Lebanon's topics - tribe.net

New Middle East Culture & Politics Tribe

2009-01-28T22:12:08Z

New Middle East Culture & Politics Tribe

This group is open to all who want to discuss Near East and Middle East culture & politics and imperialist intervention in a meaningful way.

Those who want to argue using personal attacks, lies, slander, red baiting, and ridicule instead of addressing the issues will be banned from the group. People with a history of doing so in other groups will not be allowed entry into this group.

In addition, it is fine to question the legitimacy of any and all religions, but racism and attacks on entire oppressed groups such as Palestinians and Kurds is not allowed.

Join Near and Middle East Culture & Politics:
http://tribes.tribe.net/neareast

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

make a difference

2009-01-19T03:15:28Z

I would like to ask that some of you very intelligent people take a few minutes to take action. Use your fabulous thinking skills and words to craft a letter to your senator.
Petitions do a little bit of good. Letters do A LOT.
They don't have to watch demonstrations on TV, but they DO read letters. They truly DO get attention.
www.senate.gov/ (go here to find how to contact yours)
AND Incoming Secretary of State Hilary clinton. Her senate email addy is geared towards her state representation of course and she's not officially "in office" yet. I haven't found her new address yet but I imagine it will be here
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html
quite soon. :D
Also, we have a new president coming in. One with a history of listening to his people. Here is where you can send a letter to (almost) President Obama. www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

It's clear our current policies are not effective in maintaining peace for anyone in these two countries. Our policies must change. Please let your voice be heard. Take the time to express your views to someone who can make a difference.

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

demonstrate for peace

2009-01-10T16:55:39Z

there is an event to protest the genocide in the Gaza strip that might interest you
http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/event/PROTEST-GENOCIDE-National-Day-of-Protest-to-Stop-USIsrael-Genocide/san-francisco-ca/6b866c99-d7df-4895-9ae5-d7719d5d4239

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Updates from the BBC on the current crisis

2008-08-12T12:34:02Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7404034.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7403951.stm

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

dancing to Nour Mehana

2008-05-09T19:27:09Z

this singer is from Syria, but I am almost sure, many of you know him. I love him!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oweWJRUIHQ&feature=user

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

"Tribe" Backs Anti-Palestinian Racists

2008-03-05T06:46:56Z

Message from "Free Palestine End Zionism" moderator:

This is being sent to you because you were a member of my tribe, Free Palestine End Zionism. I would like you to know that I was notified today by a representative of tribe.net that my tribe was "anti-semitic" and that they removed it!

I am sending this so you will know why the tribe does not exist any more and so you will bear witness to the evident censorship and lack of the freedom of speech on tribe.net, plus the fabricated excuse to silence my tribe.

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Business networking and Events

2008-02-17T13:08:31Z

i would like to invite my Tribe network to join me on www.connectture.com - its a social business network based in Europe with a growing base of users from all over the world. Easy way of keeping track of your Business Network.

Cheers

Sarah

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

New Tribe: Free Palestine End Zionism

2008-02-13T11:33:10Z

Free Palestine End Zionism

This tribe is dedicated to the goal of a free Palestine--free of Zionist occupation and free of Zionism. We believe that the "Jewish State of Israel" should come to an end and a non-religious, pluralistic, secular State of Palestine should replace it, open to all citizens, of all faiths, Muslim, Christian and Jewish.

You are welcome to join this tribe and to post your comments, or what you may have found on the Internet that furthers the Cause of a Free Palestine and an end to Zionism. If anything is posted from the Internet, please provide the URL source. If you write your own comments, please be civil.

The moderator will remove all comments that are destructive, posts that are false or anti-Palestinian, or that use foul language. If a member persists in such behavior that member will be removed.

tribes.tribe.net/freepalestineendzionism

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

new tribe for Nizar Qabbani

2008-02-05T11:35:38Z

I created a new tribe for Arabian love poems.
tribes.tribe.net/arabianlovepoems

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Shipment Lebanon – Poland

2008-01-30T22:35:19Z

Hello every one.
I am new in town.

I do have question. If someone could help I would really appreciate it.
I am trying to bay an instrument form Lebanon to be precise Sin-Al-Feel, Dahr-El-Jamal.
This instrument is a riq.
I was wondering if someone could help me find out how much would I have to pay for the shipment with all fees.
I checked DHL web site but it’s really hard to find some good information.

Maybe there is a Lebanese shipping service?

Thank you

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Hello everyone

2008-01-29T12:07:36Z

I've joinned this tribe after getting my first taste of modern lebanese music, after getting a C.D off my Belly Dance instructor, and i have to say i absolutely love it.
The music is so happy, and joyous, and very sassy

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism

2008-01-14T14:35:28Z

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism
By STEVEN ARGUE
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/13/18472076.php

Today, in an attempt to smear me, posts have gone up all over the internet accusing me of being an anti-Semite. Pieces of the following essay are posted with other words inserted that are not my own. In addition, accusations have been made that I have attempted to delete the following essay from the public record. To contradict this smear tactic, and to prove that opposing Zionism is not anti-Semitic, I am reposting the entire essay in full.

I wrote the following essay early in 2001 as part of a discussion on the violence and repression taking place in Israel at the time. Yet, the essay is still entirely relevant, because it takes a historical look at the roots of the conflict, and discusses how the Zionist movement has been harmful to both Arabs and Jews alike.

How Israel Promotes Anti-Semitism (Part 1)

In this mailing: Pro-zionist Letter on Israel from Becky Johnson and Response by Steve Argue.

Letter to Editor,

You have to go back and read your history books. Palestine was the name the British gave to the mandate they took over (in typical British imperial fashion) from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Palestinians at the time included everyone who lived there, including the Jews. Palestine ceased to exist when Israel was formed in 1948. The plan
from the UN was to have the state of Palestine right next to Israel. But all the Arab neighbors (and the Arab population within the borders of the new state of Israel) rejected this two state solution and responded by out and out war waged on the Israelis.

The Palestinians (Arabs who live or lived within the boundaries of Israel) didn't even start to call themselves that until 1968--- twenty years after the establishment of Israel. Basically the concept of Palestine is a manufactured one to drum up support for these Arabs and to decrease support for Israel by the claim that Israel is on THEIR land.

Remember, the Arabs and muslims [sic] who did not flee in 1948, but stayed in Israel have full citizenship, have freedom to practice their religion, own property, vote, have representation in the Knesset, and compose 18% of the population.

There is no Palestine. And there never was except as a British invention.

---Becky Johnson

Steven Argue responds:

Actually, history is one of my strong points. You state that I need to consult my history books, yet you make statements that are inarguably historically incorrect. Palestine was in existence as a recognized territory of the Ottoman Empire long before British control and even before the beginnings of Jewish colonization by the Zionist movement.

These inhabitants of the region also had Arab nationalist sentiments that opposed the control of the Ottoman Empire before the creation of the Zionist State and have since opposed many of the U.S., French, and British imposed kings, crown princes, emirs, sheiks, etc. that Zionists like to claim represent the aspirations of the Arab people.

Your attempt to deny a people of even the name of their homeland is consistent with an ideology that denies an entire people of the right to their homeland. The fact that bloody repression and horrible discrimination has driven the majority of Palestinians from large parts of their homeland without the right of return is not enough. The Zionist movement wants to wipe away the rightful name of the land they have conquered by re-writing history and denying there ever was a Palestine.

From its beginnings in the eighteen hundreds the Zionist movement had little concern for the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian land they would settle. Instead, they appealed to imperialist powers as potential allies against the Arab people in setting up their Zionist state. For example, Zionist leader T. Herzl stated around 1897: "If his majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could undertake to regulate Turkey's finances. For Europe, we would constitute a bulwark against Asia down there; we would be the advance post of civilization against barbarism. As a neutral state, we would remain in constant touch with all of Europe, which would guarantee our existence" (Rodinson, "Israel a Colonial Settler State?").

By being “neutral”, Herzl is obviously referring to the Zionist dealings with powers of Europe, and not to the colonial "barbarians" already in and around the land he would settle and conquer.

An Arab leader in Jerusalem named Nassif Bey al-Khalidi who tried unsuccessfully to work out an agreement between Arabs and the Zionist movement warned the Zionists with the following statement, "Be very careful, Messieurs Zionists, governments disappear, but peoples remain. The Jewish immigrants came to Palestine believing it to be a desolate, sparsely inhabited country. They were too busy with their own business and too ignorant of Arabic to notice what was going on around them. Since it was the Turks who ruled Palestine, they turned all their attention toward the Turks. This did not make them popular with the Arabs" (Neville Mandel, "Chapters of Arab-Jewish Diplomacy 1918-1922").

The Jewish immigrants never became integrated in any way with the native Arab population. This was true economically, politically, socially, and linguistically. These Jewish immigrants were so separate from the Palestinian people that they were only Palestinian to the extent that they were physically living in Palestine.

It took the weakening of the Sultan during the First World War for Europe (specifically England) to move in and grant the colonial framework for Jewish colonization that aimed itself at the goal of an exclusively Jewish state. This framework was set forth in a British political charter in November 1917 called the Balfour Declaration which stated, "His Majesty's government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

Within this framework an exclusive Jewish state was the stated goal of all but a small minority in the Zionist movement, a goal that obviously would be at the expense of the Arab people already living in Palestine. In order to placate the Palestinians, however, the Balfour declaration stated, "It should be clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

While Britain was trying to placate the Arabs, Zionist leader Jabotinsky was very clear on Zionist intentions, stating in 1923 in his Book the "Iron Wall", "There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization took place with the agreement of the native population."

In understanding the existence of a Palestinian people and the struggles yet to come, Jabotinsky went on to state, "They have the precise psychology we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope."

Jabotinsky's view, and the policy that would later be carried out against the Palestinians, could not be made any clearer than his following statement from the same writing: "We can not give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to the other Arabs. Therefore a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the native population. Therefore it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the Arab population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy."

In explaining the differences between Zionist factions in dealing with the Palestinians Jabotinsky stated, "Force must play its role - with strength and without indulgence. In this, in this there are no differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other prefers an Iron Wall of English bayonets."

On these issues Rabbi Judas L. Magnes, President of the Hebrew University Jerusalem wrote, "by definition a Jewish state means that Jews will govern other people, other people who live in this Jewish state…Jabotinsky knew this long ago. He was the prophet of the Jewish state...In his early writings he said: 'Has a people ever been known to give up its territory of its own volition? Likewise, the Arabs of Palestine will not renounce their sovereignty without violence.'"

On the morals of Jabotinsky's plans and his desire to extinguish all hopes of the Palestinian people he is as clear in the "Iron Wall" as Hitler is of his intentions in "Mein Kampf" with Jabotinsky stating: "To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer 'absolutely untrue.' This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest hope for the Arabs to impede us they will not sell these hopes - not for any sweet word nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall."

In 1940 Jabotinsky states in "The Jewish War Front": "Since we have the moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of the Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer."

While the Arabs of Palestine were extremely tolerant of the Zionists who were moving in to take their land and their hopes, the Zionist movement was never interested in forming any sort of alliance with the Arab people. Instead, the Zionist movement from its inception was openly anti-Arab and pro-imperialist, even though those same imperial powers were the same ones who were carrying out pogroms against the Jews in the ghettos across Europe. This pro-imperialist policy included close relations with the pogromist leaders of anti-Semitic Czarist Russia who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, and later Zionist support and deals that aided the fascist death camps of Nazi Germany.

Jews, in fact, are victims of Zionism along side Arabs. From the beginning of Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 the Zionist movement lent their support to the Nazis, support which lasted until at least 1944 when they aided Hitler's "final solution" in Hungary killing 800,000 Jews. On the surface, the idea of Zionist relations with the Nazis may sound illogical and seem made up. Those relations, however, are well documented.

Hitler seized power in 1933 with a clear fascistic program that called for the annihilation of all socialists, communists, labor leaders, and Jews. Despite this fact, the Zionist Federation of Germany sent the Nazi Party a memorandum on June 21, 1933 stating: "…a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life … must also take place in the Jewish national group. On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state, which has established itself on the principle of race, we wish to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…." (Brenner, Zionism, pg. 48)

The policy of supporting Hitler was later upheld at the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933, where a motion to take action against Hitler was defeated 240 to 43. Thus, the Jewish boycott of the German economy at a time of economic weakness and vulnerability was broken with the World Zionist Organization's Anglo Palestine Bank resuming trade. In fact, the World Zionist Organization became the principal distributors of Nazi goods in Northern Europe and the Middle East.

Feivel Polkes was a member of Zionist leader Jabotinsky's Haganah militia. He was sent by Jabotinsky to Berlin to inform Nazi leader Adolf Eichman of his intention to spy for the S.S. in exchange for the release of the money of German Jews for use on the Zionist project. Zionist Feivel told Nazi Eichman, "Jewish Nationalist Circles are very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews would reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs" (Brenner, "Zionism" pg. 99).

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, felt so fond of the Zionist movement and their close working relations that he wrote a 12 part report in Der Angriff (The Assault) praising the Zionist movement, and ordered a medallion struck with a swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.

Collaboration included an agreement in Hungary between Zionist agent Dr. Rudolph Kastner and Nazi leader Adolph Eichman. Under the 1944 agreement the Nazis would murder 800,000 Hungarian Jews without Zionist interference and with complete silence from the Zionist movement. In exchange, 600 prominent Jews would be freed from Hungary. The Nazis then opened up a Rescue Department in Hungary headed by Kastner. These facts were exposed by a survivor named Malchiel Greenwald who was subsequently sued by the Israeli government, sued by the same leaders that had fashioned the deal made by Kastner in the first place.

Kastner's collaboration with the Nazis was confirmed with the Israeli court stating, "The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand." (Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case
124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem; cited in Ralph Schoenman’s “Hidden History of Zionism”)

The Zionists subsequently ignored a plan drawn up by the resistance that could have saved many, if not most, of Hungary's Jews. The Zionist silence and lack of action against Nazi atrocities in fact characterizes their stance throughout the entire holocaust. A plan, complete with maps, was drawn up that would blow-up railroad tracks to the death camps and crematoria and airdropped ammunition to the 80,000 Jews in Auschwitz. Part of the plan also included the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up the Auschwitz facility that was murdering 13,000 people a day. Had the Zionist movement not been so intent on fighting the Arabs, rather than the real anti-Semite butchers of Europe, they could have gathered the resources to carry out such operations. Likewise, Great Britain and the United States could have carried out the proposed measures as well, but chose not to save the Jews, and felt no pressure from the silent Zionist movement to do so.

This caused Rabbi Weismandel, who had drawn up the plans against Auschwitz, to ask of the Zionists in July 1944, "this special message to inform you that yesterday the Germans began deportations of Jews from Hungary. … The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end: Twelve thousand Jews - men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily. And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder. Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered or waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the cold bloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour. You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane?" (Shoenman, "The Hidden History of Zionism?")

The Zionists also opposed the immigration of Jews to other countries where they could escape extermination. Explaining their policy of pressuring Great Britain and the United States not to adopt immigration policies that would have saved the lives of Jews, Zionist leader Ben Gurion stated in 1938, "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I would opt for the second option" (Brenner, "Zionism", pg. 149).

The ability of the Zionist movement to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews for the settling of Palestine had a consistent inner logic. That logic speaks volumes. While some of the first victims of these Zionist madmen were the Jewish people, the Palestinians were next. And today, the continued Zionist mistreatment of the Palestinian people is one of the biggest threats to the lives of Jewish people because some of the Arab victims of Zionism now do not differentiate between the crimes of Zionism and the Jewish people. In addition, the Israeli government aided in the formation of the anti-Semitic organization Hamas, and today uses their suicide bombings against civilians as a way to gain sympathy and support in the Zionist war against the Palestinian people (more on this later). Objectively, the Zionist capitalist state is, in fact, the common enemy of both Jews and Arabs.

In the 1940s Jews were only one third of the population of Palestine. The Arab majority had not yet been driven from their land. The British, in considering their entire imperial interests in the Middle East and their need for good relations with Arabs had backtracked from their original support of a Jewish state in Palestine. Thus the Zionist minority carried out a war of independence against Britain in order to set up the Jewish state. The Palestinian people, the majority of the population, were not consulted by the Zionists on what kind of future they would like to have for their homeland and had little involvement in the war, although a few did side with British forces.

After independence from the Britain in 1948, the Zionist state began a massive expropriation of Palestinian land that has not ended. Becky Johnson's claim that, "the Arabs and Muslims who did not flee in 1948, but stayed in Israel have full citizenship, have freedom to practice their religion, own property, vote, have representation in the Knesset, and compose 18% of the population" is so utterly untrue as to defy common sense. Besides defying the facts, which we shall establish, I ask why most of an entire people would voluntarily flee the land in which they had built flourishing towns, a rich agriculture, and a vibrant cultural life with nowhere else to go? The short answer is that they did not flee voluntarily. They had met the "Jewish bayonets" of Zionist Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall". To deny this fact comes in on the same level as those who deny the Holocaust of Europe.

The humiliating conditions of the Palestinian people were recently observed by former anti-Apartheid fighter Archbishop Desmond Tutu who wrote:

"I have been very deeply distressed by my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young police officers prevented us from moving about.

"On my visit to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

"I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: 'Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.'

"My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon?"

Although the Israeli government claims that Palestinians have the right to own property, this is a lie. Ever since 1948, Palestinians in Israel do not have the right to own land, because their land is often confiscated by force for Hebrew speaking settlement and agriculture. Water rights have been systematically cut off and diverted away from Palestinian lands and given to stolen Hebrew owned lands. Palestinian laborers are then denied by law the right to work the Hebrew owned agricultural lands, although they are sometimes illegally employed as cheap labor with no labor rights.

Palestinians do not have the right to freely travel. Reminiscent of chattel slavery, Palestinian families are often separated by Israeli officials who commonly do not grant necessary permits for Palestinians to enter neighborhoods or towns where wives, husbands, or children live. In contrast, the Hebrew speaking population has full rights to travel.

Palestinians often do not have the right to keep their own homes, which are often confiscated or bulldozed. The bulldozing of houses is a common punishment of families whose children are accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Recently, in Jenin, houses were bulldozed with people inside, an act that besides killing people, also made an estimated 4,000 people homeless.

Palestinians do not have the right to freedom of speech and regularly face arrest, torture, and even death for their political views. Even Hebrew speakers who support rights for Palestinians, or an end to Israeli wars, have, at times, had their press shut down by the Israeli government, or had their demonstrations attacked and beaten by Israeli soldiers.

Palestinians do not have the same right to an education as Hebrew speaking people, based on the fact that higher education is paid for through the forced military inscription of Hebrew speakers, while Palestinians are generally excluded from the military. While most Palestinians can’t serve, so-called “Israeli Arabs” have the choice of serving, but it would, in fact, make no sense for Palestinians to serve their military, since humiliation, brutality, and outright terror against Palestinians is a part of every day duty for an Israeli soldier. Likewise, few blacks served in the Apartheid military of South Africa. In Israel, this is used to deny Palestinians their right to education.

Those Palestinians who are then driven out of what was once Palestine usually are not allowed to return, while Jews who have never set foot in Israel are granted automatic citizenship, with the exception of two Jewish supporters of Palestinians named Ralph Shoenman and Mya Shone, who have the honor of not being allowed into Israel because of their excellent writings. Those Palestinians who are forced from Israel are often bombed by Israel in their refugee camps or massacred in other ways. In the 1982 case of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, Palestinians were rounded up and systematically slaughtered in the thousands by Israeli troops and their Phalangist Militia allies.

As survivor Mrs. Sersawi testified in a Belgium appeals court on the Israeli governments war crimes:

"The Lebanese forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance of the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children climbed over bodies to get to this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on a loudspeaker shouting, 'give us your men.' We thought, 'thank God, they will save us.'

"We were told to walk up the road to the Kuwaiti Embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist Militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan (her husband with whom she was 3 months pregnant) and Faraj (her brother-in-law). It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to Cite Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went around saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11 AM. An hour later we were told to leave. But we stood outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men.

"Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4 PM an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you waiting for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again."

Sabra and Shatila are only one of the massacres of people done by the Israeli government in the past 54 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Today, all of the Palestinian towns of historic Palestine are either occupied by Israeli troops who are killing people, or surrounded by Israeli troops and tanks who are poised to attack. While Israeli troops are claiming that they are only killing combatants, Human Rights Watch has documented the following crimes in Jenin alone: murders of civilians including children, the old, and the disabled; summary executions; the bulldozing of houses with people in them; and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The cities of Ramallah and Jenin have been laid to waste by the Zionists just as the Nazis smashed the towns of Guarnica and Lidice in the name of collective punishment. Likewise, the heroic resistance of Palestinian fighters in the face of superior military force is reminiscent of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto and Vilna.

The Israeli offensive will not stop those willing to do suicide missions against civilians, attacks that are futile attempts to combat the genocide Palestinians face. The Israeli offensive does the opposite, in deepening the conditions that created suicide bombers in the first place. The anger created is by escalated Israeli murder is actually more likely to increase the number of tragic attacks on Hebrew speaking civilians. At the same time, Israel has not targeted the main base of the suicide bombers, Gaza, where Hamas is heavily organized. In fact, the murderous Israeli repression really isn't meant to stop attacks on Hebrew speaking civilians because these bombings by Hamas actually play right into the Zionist government's aims and objectives in dividing Arab and Hebrew speaking peoples, diverting international sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and potentially pushing for a “final solution” against the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian Authority, who the Israeli government consistently blame for the attacks by Hamas.

Hamas is an anti-Semitic fundamentalist religious organization that killed 150 Israeli civilians through suicide bombings between 1994 and 1998 alone. From its beginnings as the Mujama in the 1970s to this day, Hamas does not face the same kind of repression as any other Palestinian group. In addition, Hamas reportedly receives $28 million dollars a year from another key U.S. ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. and the Saudi Arabian monarchy work together closely to systematically loot Saudi Arabia's oil resources for the profits of U.S. oil monopolies, while the vast majority of the Saudi people live in poverty. In addition, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Hamas worked together closely in the U.S. war drive to destroy the left progressive PDPA government that held power in Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992. This was a war where the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia gave billions of dollars of military aid to Osama Bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalists of the Mujahedin who were waging a holy war against the advances in women's rights, including women's literacy, that were occurring under the PDPA government. Tactics of the Mujahedin included throwing acid in the faces of women liberated from the veil and murdering women for teaching little girls how to read and write. Fearing a Mujahedin government right on its border, and defending the PDPA government from U.S. aggression, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979. Although these Soviet troops were invited by the Afghan PDPA, U.S. propaganda called this a “Soviet invasion”.

An estimated 100,000 of the Islamic fundamentalists who fought in Afghanistan were recruited by the CIA outside of Afghanistan. Hamas participated in this activity. As John Cooley from ABC news pointed out on March 13th, 1996 in the International Herald Tribune:

"A key Hamas organizer was Abdallah Azzam. He was a tough, brilliant and charismatic Palestinian from Jordan. He supervised training for the CIA's Afghan guerrillas in Peshawar, Pakistan, where a car bomb killed him in 1989. In the earlier 1980s he toured the United States, recruiting Arab-Americans for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan."

Just as the United States used Hamas against the Afghani people and the leftist PDPA government, Israel has used the religious fundamentalists of Hamas as a club against the socialist and secular nationalist movements in Palestine that Hamas has violently opposed. It is those secular and socialist movements that Israel has seen as more of a threat in terms of winning the masses of people, including Hebrew speakers, over to positions of sympathy and solidarity with the Palestinians. Hamas's suicide bombers against civilians instead serve Zionist interests in driving a larger wedge between Palestinians and Hebrew speakers, people who will need to unite against their common oppressor and killer, the Israeli Zionist government.

Early Israeli support for Hamas included in 1978 the granting of Mujama charitable status in Gaza while other organizations, especially political organizations as Mujama was, could not get such status. In 1979, Israeli collusion with the Mujama movement set up the Islamic University of Gaza, whose anti-PLO and anti-socialist slogan was: "How can uncovered women and men with Beatle haircuts liberate our holy places?" Students who did not tow the Islamic line were disciplined through brutal beatings and sometimes had acid thrown in their faces. In addition, Mujama mobs were allowed to violently attack and burn down PLO controlled institutions at a time when other street demonstrations were not allowed or tightly controlled by the Israeli authorities.

In 1979 the Mujama movement burned the Palestinian Red Crescent Society's (PRC) building to the ground. In response, the PRC issued the following statement, "The tacit approval of the authorities, if not their actual connivance in what happened, was displayed in their attitude of non-interference. While they usually display great alertness to combating even peaceful demonstrations of young students within schools, here they stood indifferently watching a violently destructive demonstration march to its objectives."

In 1988 Hamas was formed out of Mujama. While PLO supporters were organizing mass demonstrations in the streets, Hamas was instead focusing on shooting Israeli soldiers. Despite this fact, Hamas had top-level meetings with the Israeli government while that same government would not even meet with the PLO. Milton Edwards in "Islamic Politics In Palestine" noted the relationship:

"The relationship between Hamas and the Israeli authorities was, however, at the strongest during the second year of the Intifada. The Israelis had been quick to extend legitimacy status to Hamas in an attempt to marginalize the PLO. Leaders of Hamas were regularly filmed at meetings with top-level Israeli officials and the message the Israelis were sending out was that they regarded Hamas as the type of people with whom they could work…

"In addition the Israelis continued turning a blind eye to large amounts of money coming into the country destined for Hamas coffers, while at the same time stopping the flow of PLO funds in support of the
Intifada."

In 1994, Hamas began its indiscriminate attacks on Hebrew speaking people through suicide bombings. Those suicide bombings had been stepped up by Hamas in the beginnings of the Intifada 2 uprising in September 2000, but then ended due to an agreement between Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Hamas. While this agreement was in effect world attention became focused on the gunning down of Palestinian children by Israeli sharp shooters on the West Bank. For the Zionist government this was becoming a public relations disaster.

Israeli Prime Minister Sharon needed a new provocation he could use as propaganda to escalate the war against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). To create this provocation he took action to end the truce between the P.A. and Hamas on ending the suicide bombings of civilians. On November 23rd Israeli security forces assassinated Hamas leader Mahmud Abu Hunud. On November 25th, 2001 right-wing Israeli journalist Alex Fishman accurately observed in the "Yediot Achronot", "Whoever gave the green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line."

Of course no one but Sharon could have given the green light for such an important operation. Sharon's provocation against the Hamas anti-Semites had its intended affect. Within days Hamas resumed attacks against Israeli civilians. In March a Hamas bomber killed 25 civilians in the Passover attack that was then used by Sharon as his excuse to attack the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority while leaving the Hamas stronghold of Gaza untouched.

The U.S. government's massive military support to the Zionist State and, to a lesser extent to the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchy, is responsible for the bloodshed in Palestine. The racist state of Israel currently receives 300,000 dollars per hour in U.S. military and economic aid. The F-16 bombers and Apache and Cobra helicopters used in the latest attacks are just some of the weapons used to kill Palestinians that are made in the United States.

Socialists stand for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and all of the crowned princes, sheiks, emirs, and Islamic fanatics of the Middle East. We understand that these U.S. policies are the policies of both the Democrat and Republican Parties. Imperialist policy isn't the result of some misunderstanding by these parties of the wealthy. Instead, the repressive and genocidal policies of U.S. imperialism flow from the drive for profits by the rapacious U.S. capitalists that rule America and much of the world. From this understanding, socialists know that the only way we will get a just foreign policy, fair treatment of workers and the poor, and sound ecological policies, is through a socialist revolution in the United States.

---Steve Argue, for Liberation News

This is an article of Liberation News, a low volume newsletter, Subscribe free!
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Anthony Bourdain In Beirut on Travel Channel

2007-08-21T22:47:53Z

"No Reservations"

My husband and children have been to Lebanon 4 times. We did not go last year or this year, because of the unsettled issues.

We were teary eyed watching this silly cooking show. It captured better than any news program the reality of people who live there. We spend time in that hotel, and surely it is where we would have most likely would up had we been there.

One thing I found irritating, as the jets flew over bombing, he never identifies them as Israeli.

http://travel.discovery.com/video/video.html?videoRef=45257cb506a5cf904d59f7a1314886fa92958ccf

Bombing these people who are eating, dancing, and trying to enjoy life . .

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

A Prayer

2007-06-16T17:44:07Z

Dear Friends and Lovers of Lebanon,

Today I woke up here in Queens, NY and I sat with my mom in my back yard sipping on a delicious cup of ( kahwee arabieh) or turkish coffee (for those that have an issue with the first name) the weather is perfect, birds all around, the incredible smell of honey suckle filled the air…just perfect. All of the sudden an incredible sadness took over my heart, the reality of it is happening of Lebanon today is just too sad, too ugly to forget and enjoy the back yard. I grew up in a war torn Lebanon, and left it in the late eighties to start a new life here and to forget about it all…but who can forget Lebanon? Who can forget the dream of peace? Who can forget their childhood? The walks in the evenings with the friends…picking the figs in the morning, looking at the most beautiful skies, you can reach the stars in your hand, reading Gibran under the olive trees my grandfather had planted many years ago…how can I forget? How can I forget ten thousand pages of memories I had in my little town in the mountains.Today, I sit here with my mom listening to the news on our satellite TV, seeing the country on the verge of a big war again, and fighting in the Palestinian camps, an explosion here and an explosion there, the assassination of this leader and that leader. I call the rest of my family that remain there, all they want to know is how to get a visa to get out ? Sad indeed…” inshallah khair” God willing it will be good-…”Allah bedabir” –God will take care of it all- my mom always says, despite all her faith never wavered and her optimism stays strong no matter how dark it gets, I don’t understand this kind of will, I don’t understand this kind of optimism, maybe because her roots are deep in the land… maybe because she drank from Lebanon’s rivers for so long…or maybe because she endured the cold winds on the top of his mountains …my Mom…my Cedar tree.
Let us join together with my mom in a prayer for our beloved Lebanon…and …..”inshallah khair”

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Today

2007-05-23T07:58:54Z

i just want to ask if someone knows about situation in Beirut today. Is it safe to go there now. I am watching news,but i have not heard anything about Lebanon past weeks.

posted in Lebanon - 9 replies

JOIN THIS TRIBE!

2007-02-05T08:08:58Z

http://tribes.tribe.net/politicsreligionothers

Just want a beyond heated intelligent political and otherwise debate.

this tribe is not for the meek.
So if you know you are not going to be able to handle it, DONT JOIN!

Ok folks, thanks and let the games begin.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Long but interesting...from Dr. James Zogby "Lebanon On The Edge"

2007-01-30T14:04:08Z

Lebanon is once again headlining the news as a result of two distinct developments. In Lebanon, a Hezbollah-called general strike spilled over into violence. Meanwhile, in Paris, Western and Arab nations met with Lebanon’s Prime Minister to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction assistance.

Some see the division between Lebanon’s two camps growing and being fueled by external partners. There are fears that the government, emboldened by pledges and aid and strong words from US President George Bush, has hardened its position vis-à-vis the opposition. At the same time the opposition, supported by Iran and Syria, has also hardened its positions. With the genie of sectarian violence now out of the bottle, the situation appears quite precarious.

There is a way, however, to bring Lebanese together, creating unity out of its fractured polity. The problem, of course, is that to do so requires vision, political will and international support. At present, all of these are in short supply.

A victim of its creation, Lebanon has long been plagued by its demographics and its setting. It is this that plays out today in the streets of Beirut and the seat of government. Represented in this clash are two distinct camps, each representing competing constituencies and patrons, engaged in a profoundly unsettling confrontation. Each side claims, for itself, absolute and exclusive legitimacy. Each claims to represent the majority will, denigrating opponents as “mere puppets” under foreign influence. And each claims that the other is engaged in a “coup”. For months, the result has been a dangerous paralysis. Now it has become much worse.

It is as if Lebanon, itself, is on a precipice, with both sides, emboldened by their domestic bases and their international support, determined to push the country over the edge. Polling in Lebanon clearly reveals these two distinct tendencies. On the one hand, there are the obvious and worrisome differences that divide the two camps. In some ways the situation is an exaggerated version of the “red-state/blue-state” phenomenon that exists in the US. On matters relating to Hezbollah’s armed presence and enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, the roles of Syria or the US, support for opposition to the current government, or naming the next leaders of the country, the divisions are deep.

On the other hand, there are remarkable points of consensus that exist as well. Most significant is the extraordinarily (and, one might add, surprisingly) strong attachment to a Lebanese identity. In fact, this identification with “country” (as opposed to other sources like “being Arab,” religious affiliation, or family, etc.) is stronger in Lebanon than in any other Arab country. There is also broad agreement on a political reform and economic development agenda. Across sectarian lines, Lebanese support a more nonconfessional system and a new “national pact”. There is also consensus on the desperate need to expand the economy, creating jobs and opportunities enabling Lebanon’s young to remain in the country of their birth.

Here’s the problem. Both Lebanon’s leaders and major external players have focused their agendas on the issues that divide Lebanese instead of those that can bring them together. In this regard, the US bears a special responsibility. By reducing itself to “a side” in Lebanon’s internal partisan conflict, the US diminishes its role and becomes a part of Lebanon’s problem.

Given that Lebanon’s two camps are as deeply divided as they are, the America’s overall favorable rating in Lebanon is lower than that give to Syria and significantly lower than Iran’s approval rating, the simple fact is that “taking sides” in Lebanon is a no-win proposition. By aggressively taking sides, the US has exacerbated the sectarian divide. The US has not only further weakened its already fragile standing in the country (due to its widely discredited support for Israel’s behavior and the war in Iraq), it has also hurt, rather than helped, the very government it has sought to support.

It is true that the consensus issues discussed here could more easily have been addressed at an earlier stage – immediately at the end of the civil war or following Syria’s departure from Lebanon. No doubt, given the tense standoff that exists, at present, it will be more difficult to find common ground. But several factors can not be ignored.

First and foremost, there can be no “victor or vanquished” in the current situation. Lebanon’s divisions are too deep and the balance of forces between the camps is such that compromise is the only acceptable outcome.

For there to be compromise some fundamental considerations must be addressed. Lebanon’s “jerry-rigged” confessional system must be reformed/abolished in recognition of the country’s changed demography. Together with this, the central government must be strengthened, with the recognition that there can be no armed groups outside of a truly representative government’s control. Finally Lebanon’s constitution must enshrine the principles of the country’s “special character” which provides for respect and protection for Lebanon’s diverse constituencies. There can be no tyranny of the majority – however, that majority is defined.

What is needed now is for Lebanon’s leaders and their international backers (including the US) to recognize that the country is a tinderbox with everyone playing with matches. It’s time to back away from confrontation and define an agenda that saves Lebanon – before it’s too late.

For comments and questions, contact jzogby@aaiusa.org

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

An Evening in Jounieh - by Uri Avnery

2006-12-01T07:47:21Z

Not exactly a historical treatise, but interesting and brutal in its
down-to-earth assessment. Of course the writer is an Israeli, albeit a
fairly sensible one.

An Evening in Jounieh
By Uri Avnery

Nov. 25, 2006

During the first Lebanon war, I visited Jounieh, a town some 20 km north
of Beirut. At the time, it served as a port for the Christian forces. It
was an exciting evening.

In spite of the war raging in nearby Beirut, Jounieh was full of life.
The Christian elite spent the day in the sun-drenched marina, the women
lounging in bikinis, the men slugging whisky. The three of us (myself
and two young women from my editorial staff - a correspondent and a
photographer) were the only Israelis in town, and so we were feted.
Everybody invited us onto their yachts, and one rich couple insisted
that we come to their home as guests of a family celebration.

It was indeed something special. The dozens of family members belonged
to the cream of the elite - rich merchants, a well-known painter,
several university professors. The drinks flowed like water, the
conversation flowed in several languages.
Around midnight, everybody was slightly drunk. The men got me into a
"political" conversation. They knew that I was an Israeli, but had no
idea about my views.

"Why don't you go into West Beirut?" one portly gentleman asked me. West
Beirut was held by Arafat's PLO forces, who were defending hundreds of
thousands of Sunni inhabitants.

"Why? What for?" I queried.
"What do you mean? To kill them! To kill everybody!"
"Everybody? Women and children, too?"
"Of course! All of them!"

For a moment, I thought that he was joking. But the faces of the men
around him told me that he was deadly serious and that everybody agreed
with him.

At that moment I grasped that this beautiful country, rich in history,
blessed with all the pleasure of life, is sick. Very, very sick.

The next day I indeed went into West Beirut, but for another purpose
altogether. I crossed the lines to meet with Yasser Arafat.

(By the way, at the end of the party in Jounieh my hosts gave me a
parting present: a big packet of hashish. On the morrow, on my way back
to Israel, after Arafat had made our meeting public, I heard over the
radio that four ministers were demanding that I should be put on trial
for treason. I remembered the hashish and it went sailing out of the car
window.)
I am reminded of that conversation in Jounieh every time something
happens in Lebanon. This week, for example.

Much nonsense is being spoken and written about that country, as if it
were a country like any other. George W. Bush talks about "Lebanese
democracy" as if there were such a thing, others speak about the
"parliamentary majority" and "minority factions"' about the need for
"national unity" to uphold "national independence", as if they were
talking about the Netherlands or Finland. All these have no connection
with Lebanese reality.

Geographically, Lebanon is a torn country, and there lies a part of the
secret of its beauty. Snow-covered mountain chains, green valleys,
picturesque villages, beautiful sea-shore. But Lebanon is also torn
socially. The two schisms are inter-connected: in the course of history,
persecuted minorities from all over the region sought refuge between its
mountains, where they could defend themselves.

The result: a large number of big and small communities, ready to spring
to arms at any moment. At best, Lebanon is a loose federation of
mutually suspicious communities, at worst a battlefield of feuding
groups which hate each other's guts. The annals of Lebanon are full of
civil wars and horrible massacres. Many times, this or that community
called in foreign enemies to assist it against its neighbors.

Between the communities, there are no permanent alliances. One day,
communities A and B get together to fight community C. The next day, B
and C fight against A. Moreover, there are sub-communities, which more
than once have been known to make an alliance with an opposing community
against their own.

Altogether, a fascinating mosaic, but also a very dangerous one - the
more so since every community keeps a private army, equipped with the
best of weapons. The official Lebanese army, composed of men from all
communities, is unable to carry out any meaningful mission.

What is a Lebanese "community"? On the face of it, it's all about
religion. But not only religion. The community is also an ethnic tribe,
with some national attributes. A Jew will easily understand this, since
the Jews are also such a community, even if spread around the world. But
for an ordinary European or American, it is difficult to understand this
structure. It is easier to think about a "Lebanese nation" - a nation
that exists only in the imagination or as a vision of the future.

The loyalty to the community comes before any other loyalty - and
certainly before any loyalty to Lebanon. When the rights of a community
or sub-community are menaced, its members rise up as one in order to
destroy those who are threatening them.

The main communities are the Christian, the Sunni-Muslim, the
Shiite-Muslim and the Druze (who, as far as religion goes, are a kind of
extreme Shiites.) The Christians are divided into several
sub-communities, the most important of which are the Maronites (named
after a saint who lived some 1600 years ago.) The Sunnis were brought to
Lebanon by the (Sunni) Ottoman rulers to strengthen their hold, and were
mainly settled in the large port cities. The Druze came to find refuge
in the mountains. The Shiites, whose importance has risen over the last
few decades, were for many centuries a poor and down-trodden community,
a doormat for all the others.

As in almost all Arab societies, the Hamula (extended family) plays a
vital role in all communities. Loyalty to the Hamula precedes even
loyalty to the community, according to the ancient Arab saying: "With my
cousin against the foreigner, with my brother against my cousin."
Almost all Lebanese leaders are chiefs of the great families.

To give some idea of the Lebanese tangle, a few recent examples: in the
civil war that broke out in 1975, Pierre Gemayel, the chief of a
Maronite family, called upon the Syrians to invade Lebanon in order to
help him against his Sunni neighbors, who were about to attack his
territory. His grandson by the same name, who was murdered this week,
was a member of a coalition whose aim is to liquidate Syrian influence
in Lebanon. The Sunnis, who were fighting against the Syrians and the
Christians, are now the allies of the Christians against the Syrians.

The Gemayel family was the main ally of Ariel Sharon, when he invaded
Lebanon in 1982. The common aim was to drive out the (mainly Sunni)
Palestinians. For that purpose, Gemayel's men carried out the horrendous
massacre of Sabra and Shatila, after the assassination of Bashir
Gemayel, the uncle of the man who was murdered this week. The massacre
was overseen by Elie Hobeika from the roof of the headquarters of the
Israeli general Amos Yaron. Afterwards, Hobeika became a minister under
Syrian auspices. Another person responsible for the slaughter was Samir
Geagea, the only one who was put on trial in a Lebanese court. He was
condemned to several life prison terms and later pardoned. This week he
was one of the main speakers at the funeral of Pierre Gemayel the
grandson.

In 1982, the Shiites welcomed the invading Israeli army with flowers,
rice and candy. A few months later they started a guerilla war against
them, which lasted for 18 years, in the course of which Hizbullah became
a major force in Lebanon.

One of the leading Maronites in the fight against the Syrians was
General Michel Aoun, who was elected president by the Maronites and
later driven out. Now he is an ally of Hizbullah, the main supporter of
Syria.

All this resembles Italy at the time of the Renaissance or Germany
during the 30-Years War. But in Lebanon this is the present and the
foreseeable future.

In such a reality, using the term "democracy" is, of course, a joke. By
agreement, the government of the country is divided between the
communities. The president is always a Maronite, the prime minister a
Sunni, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite. The same applies to all
positions in the country, at all levels: a member of a community cannot
aspire to a position suited to his talents if it "belongs" to another
community. Almost all citizens vote according to family affiliation. A
Druze voter, for example, has no chance of overthrowing Walid Jumblat,
whose family has ruled the Druze community for 500 years at least (and
whose father was murdered by the Syrians.) He doles out all the jobs
"belonging" to his community.

The Lebanese parliament is a senate of community chiefs, who divide the
spoils between them. The "democratic coalition" which was put in power
by the Americans after the murder of the Sunni Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri, is a temporary alliance of the Maronite, Sunni and Druze chiefs.
The "opposition", which enjoys Syrian patronage, is composed of the
Shiites and one Maronite faction. The wheel can turn at a moment's
notice, when other alliances are formed.

Hizbullah, which appears to Israelis as an extension of Iran and Syria,
is first of all a Shiite movement that strives to obtain for its
community a larger part of the Lebanese pie, as indeed is its due in
accordance with its size. Hassan Nasrallah - who is also the scion of an
important family - has his eyes on the government in Beirut, not on the
mosques in Jerusalem.

What does all this say about the present situation?

For decades now, Israel has been stirring the Lebanese pot. In the past,
it supported the Gemayel family but was bitterly disappointed: the
family's "Phalanges" (the name was taken from Fascist Spain, which was
greatly admired by grandfather Pierre), were revealed in the 1982 war as
a gang of thugs without military value. But the Israeli involvement in
Lebanon continues to this day. The aim is to eliminate Hizbullah, remove
the Syrians and threaten nearby Damascus. All these tasks are hopeless.

Some history: in the 30s, when the Maronites were the leading force in
Lebanon, the Maronite Patriarch expressed open sympathy for the Zionist
enterprise. At that time, many young people from Tel-Aviv and Haifa
studied at the American University of Beirut, and rich Jewish people
from Palestine spent their holidays at Lebanese resorts. Once, before
the founding of Israel, I crossed the Lebanese border by mistake and a
Lebanese Gendarme politely showed me the way back.

During the first years of Israel, the Lebanese border was our only
peaceful one. Those days there was a saying: "Lebanon will be the second
Arab country to make peace with Israel. It will not dare to be the
first". Only in 1970, when King Hussein drove the PLO from Jordan into
Lebanon, with the active help of Israel, did this border heat up. Now
even Fuad Siniora, the prime minister appointed by the Americans, feels
compelled to declare that "Lebanon will be the last Arab state to make
peace with Israel!"

All efforts to remove Syrian influence from Lebanon are bound to fail.
In order to understand this, it is enough to look at the map.
Historically, Lebanon is a part of the land of Syria ("Sham" in Arabic).
The Syrians have never resigned themselves to the fact that the French
colonial regime tore Lebanon from their land.

The conclusions: First, let's not get stuck in the Lebanese mess again.
As experience has shown, we shall always come out the losers. Second, in
order to have peace on our northern border, all the potential enemies,
and first of all Syria, must be involved.

Meaning: we must give back the Golan Heights.

The Bush administration forbids our government to talk with the Syrians.
They want to talk with them themselves, when the time comes. Quite
possibly, they will then sell them the Golan in return for Syrian help
in Iraq. If so, should we not hurry and "sell" them the Golan (which
belongs to them anyhow) for a better price for ourselves?

Lately, voices have been heard, even of senior army people, that hint at
this possibility. It should be said loudly and clearly: Because of a few
thousands of settlers and the politicians who do not dare to confront
them, we are liable to be dragged into more superfluous wars and to
endanger the population of Israel.

This is the third conclusion: There is only one way to win a war in
Lebanon - and that is to avoid it.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

You Will Love it

2006-11-30T09:12:27Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBELx_sHr5Y&NR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98bk0ErTC74

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_epTSNyRGU

very very very awesome

posted in Lebanon - 7 replies

visit this site

2006-09-12T10:05:22Z

http://www.leb.org

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Pro-War Diane Feinstein, What Are The Alternatives?

2006-09-06T14:50:24Z

Pro-War Diane Feinstein, What Are The Alternatives?

By Steven Argue

In California pro-war incumbent Democrat Diane Feinstein has a lead of around 20% over Republican challenger Richard Mountjoy. There are also three socialist candidates running in California for the Senatorial seat now held by Feinstein. Of these, the two that Liberation News is giving critical support are Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action and Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party. In addition International Socialist Organization (ISO) member, Todd Chretien, is running as a Green Party candidate.

Feinstein has voted for every war the United States has carried out since she came into office in 1992. Diane Feinstein also voted to take away our civil liberties by supporting the “Patriot Act” and its renewal. She voted for the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act speeding up the government’s ability to carry out the racist death penalty and ignore evidence of innocence. And she has supported expanded wire tapping as well as a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.

Feinstein is a capitalist politician, representing a capitalist party. She also has a personal net worth of 50 million dollars, so she benefited directly when she voted to eliminate the estate tax. Ironically Feinstein has also stated, “Food stamps for the poor are cut ... so that millionaires can have a tax cut.'' Indeed, while this statement was directed at the Republicans, it also applies to her. (Feinstein Urges Regime Change, San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2006)

Diane Feinstein, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum of the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans.

And just as she is no defender of human rights in the United States she has voted for continued military support to the right wing death squad government of Colombia.

Diane Feinstein: Supporter of Imperialist War

In a press conference on August 21, 2006 George Bush Jr. finally admitted what Liberation News has been pointing out since before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th. Yet Bush had used a supposed connection as a pretext for the U.S.’s unprovoked aggression against Iraq. In addition, Bush Jr. also admitted that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

All of the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Diane Feinstein included, supported going to war with Iraq. As anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has pointed out, “She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops." (Cindy Sheehan May Challenge California Senator AP, Jan. 26, 2006) Cindy Sheehan’s son was a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

In trying to let herself of the hook Diane Feinstein claims that Bush “did not fairly represent intelligence”. Feeble cries by these politicians today that their votes for war weren’t their fault because they were lied to by Bush not only make Feinstein look stupid, they are an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

While the Democrats helped promote the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had no right to defend itself, Liberation News pointed out that it is the United States that has the weapons of mass destruction. Instead we supported the right of Iraq to acquire the weapons necessary to defend themselves from U.S. aggression. There can be little doubt that if Iraq had acquired those weapons they may not be in the mess they are now.

Yet for Bush and Feinstein Iraqi weapons were never the real motive for mass murder in Iraq. The capitalist ruling class, and their Democrat and Republican representatives, thought that they could use their superior military power to quickly move into Iraq and establish by force a stable neo-colonial puppet regime, and then make massive profits from the privatization of the Iraqi economy, especially oil. It is the failures of this imperialist plan, in the face of Iraqi resistance and growing unpopularity at home, that has forced some Democrats and Republicans to try to rethink, or at least distance themselves from, the Bush policies they have supported.

Feinstein herself has directly profiteered from the U.S. imposed misery in Iraq. Her husband, Richard Blum, is a billionaire investor that together with CEO Ronald Tutor own investment companies that hold 75% of the voting stock in a company called Perini. On March 12, 2004 Perini was awarded a $500,000,000 contract for rebuilding the electrical infrastructure of southern Iraq. So Feinstein is profiting from the U.S. bombing of the Iraqi infrastructure as well as its inefficient rebuilding by private U.S. contractors. Perini also received the contract for the construction of facilities to support the First Brigade of the Afghan National Army. These include barracks, dining facilities, a power plant, a water treatment facility and a wastewater treatment plant. Diane Feinstein not only voted for the wars and occupations that made these contracts possible, she also sits on the Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. (Perini Corporation, The Center For Public Integrity)

Just as Liberation News opposes the U.S. occupation and corporate looting of Iraq, we also denounced the starvation blockade that was carried out through the UN by the Clinton administration. That blockade, due to the capitalist nature of the Iraqi economy under Saddam Hussein, cost the lives of about a million people, many of them children. While a socialist economy like that of Cuba could have made sure that everyone in Iraq had food, blame for this mass murder should also be put on the Clinton administration. Likewise, it was this Clinton starvation blockade that also weakened Iraq for the Bush invasion.

Today, while the U.S. occupation of Iraq has murdered over 100,000 people and the U.S. starvation blockade of Iraq murdered a million or more, the U.S. government and its puppets in Iraq have the nerve to put Saddam Hussein on trial for propaganda purposes. Yet the worst crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime were also carried out when he was directly backed by the United States. In the 1980’s the U.S. was giving massive military assistance to Iraq to help Saddam Hussein commit genocide against Kurds and carry out a bloody war with Iran at a time when Saddam Hussein was used as an ally of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Likewise the CIA helped Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party come to power supplying them with the names of 5,000 socialists and labor leaders that the Ba’athists subsequently rounded up and executed.

Yet to those who claimed that an invasion of Iraq would be a chance for the U.S. to finally set things straight and set up a democracy in Iraq, Liberation News responded before the U.S. invasion saying:

“In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil fields. This helped the Iraqi people by taking a chunk of the profits made off of oil out of the hands of the international oil monopolies and instead keeping them in Iraq. This money helped pay for free healthcare and education. As such this was a socialist measure carried out by Saddam Hussein’s capitalist government. It was also a measure that stood up to the interests of the rich and powerful nations. For both reasons socialists supported the nationalization of Iraqi oil while those measures infuriated the imperialists...

“While defending Iraq against imperialist attack and supporting their right to defend themselves socialists also recognize that Saddam Hussein is a capitalist leader and that the Iraqi people have their own scores to settle with him. Yet any government set up by a US occupation army will not be democratic and will only lead to the privatization of the resources that American oil monopolies intend to steal...”

“U.S. imperialism will never solve the question of women’s liberation in the Middle East. Unlike all of the US supported governments and forces in the Arab World, Iraqi women have many rights found nowhere else in the Arab World except in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. Over 50% of Iraqi doctors are women. Iraqi women are allowed to walk unescorted in the streets. They are allowed to drive. Iraqi women can even freely criticize men. In addition Iraqi women have the right to work and control their own funds. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of women under the repressive U.S. backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where women have no rights what-so-ever.

“The U.S. ruling class hates governments like Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela who use the profits of their oil resources partly to benefit the people with social programs. Likewise they love governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that strip the people of all their rights and keep the oil profits in the hands of the international oil monopolies and their corrupt local servants. Today in the United States we face unemployment, homelessness, and a lack of health care. The billions of dollars the U.S. will squander on killing Iraqis to steal their resources should be spent to benefit the working class and poor of the United States instead.” -From Liberation News: What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq

What was predicted is reality. Those predictions were accurate because they were based on the past behavior of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. has set up a puppet Islamic government with functioning death squads and torture chambers. Socialists have been excluded from participating in elections and unarmed demonstrators have been shot down and murdered in the streets by U.S. troops. The puppet Islamic government also opposes women’s rights and women’s rights have deteriorated dramatically since the U.S. invasion. The rebuilding of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, has lagged way behind what was rebuilt by Saddam Hussein after the massive U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 1992.

With the exception of the privatization of Iraqi oil, all of the predictions have shown themselves to be true and the only reason that Iraqi oil isn’t completely under the direct control of U.S. oil monopolies now is because of the union resistance of 23,000 organized oil workers as well as the general resistance by the Iraqi people to the idea of Iraq’s resources being looted by U.S. corporations.

For the working class in the United States there is ever growing frustration with a war that is costing many lives and billions in dollars while needed programs for healthcare, jobs, the environment, and disaster relief do not get the funding they need.

Yet for the ruling class their failure in Iraq is not in the undemocratic and anti-woman nature of the puppet regime they have set up and the money that has been squandered in doing it, but in the failure of that regime to deliver the stability needed to acquire the oil loot. They complain that oil production in Iraq is below prewar levels and the occupation by U.S. and British troops serve as targets for the insurgency.

As a result some Democrats that voted for the war like John Kerry have called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Yet the Kerry-Feingold plan actually calls for keeping troops in Iraq that are "critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces." The Kerry-Feingold plan also calls for "an over-the-horizon" troop presence in the region that could come to the aid of a failing puppet government in Iraq as well as intervene elsewhere in the so-called war on terror. (Lawmakers begin Bitter Debate on U.S. Troop Withdrawal Plan for Iraq, FOXNews, online report, June 2, 2006)

Senators Harry Reid and Carl Levin have put forward a similar proposal, rendered meaningless with similar loopholes to Kerry-Feingold’s, but their proposal calls for the [partial] withdrawal of troops by the end of 1997.

Diane Feinstein supported the Levin-Reid proposal. Defending the proposal Feinstein said, “Our amendment is not about cutting and running. Rather, our amendment acknowledges that staying the course is a strategy that shows no promise of success, and it is time to change that strategy.” (Video clip shown on CNN’s O’brien Show, online transcript, June 23, 2006)

Unlike Feinstein, Liberation News sees nothing good that can come from the Levin-Reid proposal of staying at full war with the Iraqi people for another year and then carrying out a possible partial Iraqification of the war the year after. We disagree with Feinstein when she says, "We all know we can't cut and run, what I'm talking about is changing the nature of this mission. We have to say to Iraq that it's time for your soldiers and police forces to take over.'' (Feinstein Urges Regime Change, San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2006)

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is doing nothing for anybody except the capitalists that are profiting from the war and the tax dollars of the American people. We demand: Iraq to the Iraqis! U.S. Out Now! On this issue we agree with the campaigns of Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action, Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party, and Todd Chretien of the Green Party that are all calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq:

“More than 2,250 young American troops and over 100,000 Iraqis have died with no end in sight. If we want to stop the dying and respect the Iraqi people's right to run their own country, then we must immediately withdraw all American military forces from Iraq and the surrounding countries.” -Todd Chretien, California Senate candidate of the Green Party

“Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East!”
Marsha Feinland, California Senate candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party

"Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq! War is an inherent part of capitalism and the ultimate solution to the internal contradictions of the profit-driven and competition-driven system. The U.S. military-industrial complex is organized and designed to maximize profit rates for the corporate few and to serve the imperial economic and political interests of the war-making class—regardless of the capitalist party in power. Socialists acknowledge our fundamental obligation to challenge the U.S. war-makers and their twin parties and to defend the rights and struggles of all those who resist imperialist domination and oppression.” -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

Liberation news agrees with these calls for U.S. troops out now. In addition we call for the labor movement to break from the Democrat Party of war and exploitation and to end the war through building the mass movement in the streets; striking against arms producers; hot cargoing war materials on the docks, trains, and trucks; and building towards a general strike against the war. Likewise we support the right of military personal to refuse orders and resist this war. We support students, such as those at UC Santa Cruz that have repeatedly driven military recruiters off campus. And we call for building the socialist movement to end imperialism through socialist revolution.

The Role of Peace Action (Formerly Sane / Freeze)

Diane Feinstein has never seen a pending imperialist war she didn’t like. In her entire time in office she has voted for them all. Likewise Feinstein voted for the “Missile Defense System” and other “defense” boondoggles meant to line the pockets of the military industrial capitalists. Yet the group “Peace Action” gives Feinstein the passing grade of voting for peace 89% of the time.

“Peace Action” is deceiving the anti-war vote. Why? Because Peace Action is a pillar of the status quo that sees no alternative to delivering votes to what they see as the “lesser evil” Democrat Party, even when the Democrats are equally pro-war. This strategy has made “Peace Action” an obstacle to peace and a pillar of the status quo.

Every few years the ruling class of the United States parades its selected representatives in front of the American people to give us the chance to vote for their so-called “lesser” and “greater evil” representatives in the Democrat and Republican Parties. The corporate media and liberal pro-war groups like “Peace Action” ignore the anti-war candidates and back pro-war Democrats by misrepresenting their records to the people.

Liberation News urges all of the super-exploited workers that go door to door raising money for the Peace Action bureaucracy to quit your meaningless jobs and look for better work while looking for ways to hook up with the real anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that is marching in the streets. Likewise we urge all of the liberal and leftist minded people that give money to Peace Action to stop doing so and instead participate in the mass anti-war movement in the streets with your bodies, minds, and your money if you can afford it.

In response to the reformist call of, "Anybody But Bush," Socialist Action candidate Jeff Mackler aptly replied, "No to the twin parties of war and oppression!" and "Yes to the independent organization and mobilization of working people!"

Feinstein, Supporter of Racist Israel

Diane Feinstein, like many Democrats, has pounded the war drum for the racist Zionist state of Israel even louder than the Republicans. The U.S. gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every year and Senator Feinstein’s vote backs that money for death. Israel is a racist settler state established in 1949 that has denied the original inhabitants, the Palestinians, all basic rights. Besides denying Palestinians the same rights to travel, jobs, housing, and education as allowed Jews, the racist Zionist State has used massacres and other forms of terror, wars, and torture to drive out the original Palestinian inhabitants.

Likewise Israel is always at war with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s recent attack against Lebanon where their aerial bombardment of the civilian population murdered 1,150 people and destroyed vital infrastructure is only the latest such terrorism by Israel. Yet when Senator Bill Frist introduced a bill backing Israeli / U.S. aggression in Lebanon Diane Feinstein voted for it along with Senate Democrat colleagues John Kerry (Mass.), Barack Obama (Ill.), Harry Reid (Nevada), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), and Edward Kennedy (Mass.).

Claims of Israel being the victim, bombing and invading Lebanon on the pretext of two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner do not hold water in light of the fact that Israel is holding 2,000 Lebanese prisoners in their torture chamber dungeons from their previous invasion of Lebanon. In addition numerous reports say those two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, not in Israel. Those reports are from such sources as AP, Hindustan Times, and AFP.

In contrast to Diane Feinstein and her pro-war Democrat colleagues, here is what the candidates to the left of her have to say:

“Israel is a racist state. It has separate laws for Arabs and Jews. The leader of the South African trade union COSATU recently stated that he thinks that the Palestinians face worse conditions than Blacks faced during South African Apartheid. There will never be peace in the Middle East as long as the Zionist state is given a blank check from the United States to treat the Palestinian people as less than human. Israel is part of the American empire and is key to US plans for permanent domination of the Middle East. If we ever want to see our troops come home from Iraq, then the anti-war movement must fight to cut off all American aid to Israel.” -Todd Chretien, California Senate candidate of the Green Party

“As a Jewish American, I chose to run for U.S. Senate partly as an act of conscience in support of the rights of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. The wall which impedes people from conducting a normal life must come down. Israel should abandon the settlements and retreat to its pre-1967 borders. I do not condone any violence against civilians, and favor full rights for all people in any state…End U.S. aid to Israel until it withdraws to its 1967 borders.” -Marsha Feinland, California Senate candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party

“For a democratic and secular Palestine! End all U.S. aid to apartheid Israel! Stop the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza! For a united socialist federation of the Middle East! Socialists reject the legitimacy of the Zionist colonial settler state of Israel, just as we do all colonial settler states. We see no difference between the imperialist colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East of yesteryear and today’s U.S.-backed Zionist conquest and occupation of Palestine. Israel today serves as the chief U.S. instrument for the imperialist domination and exploitation of the Middle East”. -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

All three candidates of the left take the correct and most important position of ending U.S. aid to Israel, but there are important differences in building an international movement.

While Todd Chretien holds a good position on Israel, the Israeli Green Party is a Zionist capitalist party that holds the position of deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. In a recent letter to the Green Party of the United States by Green Party chairman and deputy mayor, Pe’er Visner, the closest he got to recognizing any crimes by the Israeli government was saying, “We are “sorry” that the Israeli army prevents Palestinian suicide bombers from “expressing” their “human rights” to bomb themselves among Israeli citizens.” This racist response to the suffering of the Palestinian people should serve as a warning to Green Party members in the United States of what happens to parties that fail to put forward a revolutionary program for the overthrow of capitalism as well as fail to be a tribune for all of the most oppressed and exploited in society.

Unlike Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party, Liberation News does not call for a withdrawal of Israel to its conquered borders of 1967. We instead call for pushing Israel back to its 1948 borders for a democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine within the 1948 borders with a separation of religion and state and equal rights for Palestinians and Jews including the Palestinian right to return, a society to be formed by the multi-ethnic working class through socialist revolution.

This is our context of demanding an end to U.S. military aid to racist Israel as well as to the repressive capitalist governments of Egypt and Jordan. Such a cut off is not intended to pressure Israel into a better two state “solution” as Marsha Feinland asks the U.S. government to do, but to allow the people of the Near East self-determination and revolution without the interference of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to murderous regimes.

Jeff Mackler, in seeing Socialist Action as part of an international socialist movement with an international revolutionary program, has proposed a similar revolutionary program to that of Liberation News, but missing a key ingredient:

“Zionism is an ideology of racism and apartheid segregation. It is a deathtrap for the Jewish people, a central source of almost 60 years of war and oppression of the Palestinians. Socialist Action supports the creation of a democratic and secular Palestine, where Jews and Arabs can live together as equals in a new society, a society predicated on the immediate right of return of all dispossessed Palestinians. In this society, revolutionaries will fight for the construction of an egalitarian socialist state.” -Jeff Mackler, California Senate candidate of Socialist Action

Missing from this formula is the understanding that only socialist revolution, led by (a) secular multi-ethnic socialist party or parties will be capable of solving the national and democratic questions of Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. The capitalists and their parties, be they Kadima, Likud, Labour, Shas, Hamas, Fatah, or the Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan base their rule on capitalist exploitation and are incapable of providing any real solutions. Liberation News disagrees with the idea that democratic secular revolution should occur now and provide the basis for a later struggle for socialism, pointing out that this is the essence of Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory of Revolution when we instead hold high the banner of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

It was this Stalinist Two-Stage Theory that provided the political basis for the Communist Party of South Africa putting all of their resources into building the African National Congress (ANC) as the democratic alternative to the racist apartheid government of South Africa. Yet by building a political party and movement that supported the continuation of the capitalist system they created a new capitalist party that now rules South Africa for the rich white capitalists at the continued expense of the super-exploited and poor black majority workers, minus overt racist laws. Strikes for healthcare and other workers’ demands have been broken by the ANC for the capitalists, HIV-AIDS goes untreated, and the massive mineral wealth of South Africa continues to go into the pockets of the capitalists instead of their potential of benefiting the workers, environment, and world revolution.

So when is the Communist Party of South Africa going to set about fighting for the next stage of the revolution? The answer is never. They are now part of the capitalist apparatus and part of the problem. It will take the other socialist parties of South Africa, the Trotskyist parties, to lead the socialist revolution.

While Stalinism has done much to stifle workers’ democracy in the deformed workers states under Stalinist control, it has also greatly sabotaged the world socialist revolution through Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory. Socialist Action is not a Stalinist organization, but they appear to have adopted part of their program.

So what would be Socialist Action’s ANC for Palestine? Fatah? They’ve already discredited themselves. They’ve sold the Palestinian people out with the Oslo Accords placing the Palestinian people on tiny Bantustan’s without a real basis for an economy. Would their ANC be Hamas? The imposition of Islamic law could hardly be considered a democratic secular revolution. Would they then suggest that Palestinian and Israeli socialists build a party with a purely democratic secular program, abandoning the socialist program as the Communist Party of South Africa did? Let’s drop the nonsense, build for the socialist revolution! For a democratic, secular, and socialist Palestine!

Liberation News rejects Stalin’s Two-Stage Theory of Revolution. We instead hold up the banner of Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. It was through this theory that Trotsky explained that the democratic and the socialist revolutions are inseparably linked.

Yet the differences between Liberation News and Socialist Action as well as our differences with the Peace and Freedom Party on these questions do not prevent us from giving critical support to both in this election.

The Role of the Green Party

While Todd Cretien of the Green Party has good immediate positions on the war, Liberation News does not support Green Party candidates because the Green Party is a capitalist party. In Santa Cruz, where the Green Party has elected their party member Tim Fitzemaurice to office, Tim Fitzemaurice has backed the fears of local shop owners by voting for anti-homeless laws such as the law that makes it illegal for the homeless to sleep at night. While criminalizing those who cannot pay the high rent Fitzemaurice refuses to take a stand for rent control. Likewise Tim Fitzemaurice has refused to take any stand against police violence used against anti-war protesters in 1999 and other repressive measures against activists including my arrest and beating for distributing literature and the police murder of homeless activist John Dine. Recently Fitzemaurice did take a stand against police infiltration of the organizers of a Santa Cruz anti-war parade, but his stated reason for doing so was an attempt to maintain the credibility of the Santa Cruz police.

Tim Fitzemaurice is not a leader for change in Santa Cruz. He is instead a pillar of the status quo. This is the future of all political parties and politicians that do not have a clear program for the overthrow of the capitalist system.

The Green Party is clear in their program. They state that they are for a system of small capitalism. Yet the small capitalists commonly have a smaller profit margin and often exploit workers worse than the big capitalists. In opposition to such a vision of small and inefficient capitalist exploiters, Liberation News looks to labor struggle and the nationalization of industry under workers’ control as the way to fight and neutralize the corporate exploiters and bring justice for the working class.

On a national level the Green Party generally is not even seeking power, but pressure and reform of the Democrat Party. Yet the policy of many Greens in promoting votes for Democrats when the vote between the Democrat and Republican is close only promotes further illusions in the Democrats. Likewise promising votes to Democrats when it looks close does nothing to pressure the Democrats and their super rich backers to move to the left.

It was a massive and fighting labor movement led to large extent by socialists that forced the American ruling class and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms in the 1930’s. This was out of fear of further unrest and potential revolution. It is the position of Liberation News that the most meaningful reforms do not come from reformism, such as that of the Green Party, but from revolutionary and working class struggle.

While making these criticisms Liberation News does recognize that there are differences between the program of Todd Chretien and that of the Green Party. If Todd Chretien was also speaking out for the Green Party to adopt a socialist program we could possibly give him support, but he is not. By running as a candidate and being a spokesperson for a party with a capitalist program Todd Chretien is helping build that capitalist party and program, so we must respectfully withhold our support.

Critical Support To The Socialist Candidates

Liberation News is giving critical support to Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action and Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party. These are two socialist parties that hold socialist programs (for the most part) and are also active in the anti-war, free Mumia, and labor movements. To a large degree they represent the kind of political alternative that Liberation News promotes in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans.

Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action

Jeff Mackler is a long time socialist that has done much in organizing protests against imperialist wars, for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, for socialism, and other leftist causes.

Jeff Mackler and other expelled members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) were part of establishing new groups that continued on in some of the better traditions of the SWP, a party that led the 1934 Teamster’s Strike (a turning point in U.S. labor history), a party that was a major leader in the anti-war movement of the 1970’s and 1960’s, and a party that helped establish the world Trotskyist movement and expose the crimes of Stalinism.

Yet Jeff Mackler’s group, Socialist Action, was also born with a few programmatical errors. One was their abandonment of Trotsky’s concept of Political Revolution. The call for political revolution in the deformed workers states, such as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, was a call for overthrowing the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and institutionalizing workers’ democracy without overthrowing the nationalized planned economy itself. While Trotskyists call for political revolution in the deformed workers’ states, we also defend those socialist economies from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution. The failure of Socialist Action to understand the true nature of the counter revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan led to important mistakes.

In supporting Solidarnosc in Poland Socialist Action backed a political movement that had a clear program for capitalist counter revolution and joined ranks with the CIA, the Pope, and Ronald Reagan in backing Solidarnosc’s rise to power. After taking power Solidarnosc’s program became even clearer with the outlawing of abortion (that used to be free on demand) and privatizations of the economy that led to 50% unemployment. Yet despite how clear it is today that Solidarnosc led a capitalist counter-revolution as opposed to a socialist political revolution (that would maintain the socialist economy, but oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and institute workers’ democracy) Socialist Action has not changed their position on Solidarnosc.

On Black liberation we at Liberation News advocate Richard Fraser’s Theory of Revolutionary Integrationism as opposed to the Black Nationalism promoted by Socialist Action. Socialist Action’s advocacy of Black Nationalism has brought them to the point of even promoting the religious and pro-capitalist Nation of Islam of Louis Farrakhan. Liberation News sees the promotion of Black Nationalism as a dead end. There is no geographical area that we can point to on a map and say by its demographics that it would make sense to set up Black nation there. Even if it were possible or desirable to set up a separate Black Nation in the United States the pain and suffering such an adventure would cause in terms of dislocations of the working class would not be worth the price. Liberation News, in contrast, calls for the overthrow of the racist capitalist system and the building of an egalitarian socialist society that guarantees racial equality, full employment, and access to health care for all.

Liberation News does, however, see Socialist Action’s campaign for Senate as a supportable campaign that, despite its mistakes, is promoting socialism as the alternative to the capitalist Democrats, Republicans, and Greens.

Here are some of the demands that Mackler is putting forward with his campaign:

1) Immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq! No U.S. aid to Israel! Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza! Shut down Guantanamo! U.S. hands off Cuba and Venezuela! End the Cuba blockade!
2) Tax the rich, not working people! Jobs at top union wages for all! Shorten the work-week with no cut in pay! For a revitalized and fighting labor movement! For a Labor Party!
3) Human needs before capitalist profits! Nationalize so-called bankrupt corporations under workers’ control.
4) Free quality health care and education for people of all ages! Build schools not jails! Quality affordable housing for all!
5) An emergency program to combat global warming! End our dependency on fossil fuels! No to nuclear power and weapons!
6) Stop the attacks on civil liberties! Repeal the Patriot Act! End police brutality! Support the right of marriage for same sex couples!
7) Defend a woman’s right to control her own body! Ready access to abortion is a fundamental right!
8) Immediate amnesty, legalization, and equal rights for all immigrants! No to La Migra! Demilitarize and open the border! Self-determination for oppressed nationalities! Affirmative action with quotas to remedy past discrimination! Support to Black and Latino independent political action!
9) For a government of, by, and for working people and the oppressed! For socialism!

While Liberation News agrees with many of these slogans we see a couple as too transitional. We do not see any good reason for limiting calls for nationalization to so-called “bankrupt corporations”. Perhaps this is in imitation of the economic crisis of Argentina and the many “bankrupt corporations” that have been taken over and run by workers as part of a miniature workers’ economy that employs about 10,000 Argentinean workers.

Liberation News sees no reason for limiting the nationalization of companies to those that the capitalists don’t want anymore, companies that the capitalists are no longer making super profits from. The exploitation of workers’ and the environment have produced all wealth, and the revolutionary movement of the working class wants it all back! We want the railroads, the banks, the health care industry, and of course oil! Only a society with a planned economy can meet the needs of the working class, can end war for capitalist profit, and can begin to save the environment. Revolution takes bold vision; we want it all; leave the conservatism to the Democrats and Republicans!

Imperialism has caused the poverty of Mexico, and an open border is the only right thing to do. Yet an open border would be coupled with a massive influx of immigrants and should be combined with the call for a socialist economy that guarantees jobs for all. Only socialism can solve the national question.

Jeff Mackler’s campaign for senate, despite its errors, does help show the way forward by pointing to socialist demands and solutions.

Due to the undemocratic laws of the state of California making it very difficult for third parties to gain ballot access Jeff Mackler will not be on the ballot so if you choose to vote for him you will have to write in his name.

Marsha Feinland of the Peace and Freedom Party

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) is the only socialist party in California that does have ballot status. Liberation News is also extending critical support to the PFP candidacy of Marsha Feinland. Here are key points of Marsha Feinland’s campaign:

1) Withdraw troops and advisors from Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and Colombia
2) End aid to Israel until it withdraws to its pre-1967 borders
3) Raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour
4) Create universal health care with a "single payer" (Canadian type) system- no insurance company profits
5) Shorten the work week with no loss in pay and guarantee paid vacation time for all workers
6) Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act - restore the right to strike and end "right to work" laws
7) Abolish the death penalty
8) End the phony "war on drugs" - legalize marijuana and decriminalize drug use
9) Fully fund the U.S. government share of education costs, particularly special education
10) End the war on children - stop the government mandated testing craze in public schools
11) Protect the National Forests and other public and native lands from corporate exploitation
12) Abolish the Senate and the Electoral College - one person, one vote

In this platform Marsha Feinland raises a number of good points, including opposing the undemocratic nature of the Senate itself stating, "Abolish the Senate and the Electoral College - one person, one vote." This is in reference to the way that the senate has equal numbers of representatives from each state, regardless of that state’s population. On a similar issue Diane Feinstein has been criticized by activists in Washington D.C., a district where the people do not get representation in the Senate, for supporting Washington D.C. school vouchers that were undemocratically crammed down their throats.

In the United States more than 45 million Americans have no health coverage. These include 9 million children. Millions of others have inadequate coverage. It is a crime that the richest nation (rich due to imperialist exploitation of the world) leads in medical technology, but has the worst access to healthcare of any developed nation. Marsha Feinland’s call for single payer healthcare of the Canadian model, covering everyone and getting rid of the insurance industry middlemen would be a welcome change. And yes, despite the propaganda, government programs are always more efficient than private profiteering with its stockholders, overpaid CEOs, and advertising. But the Cuban model with nationalized healthcare and no private hospitals or pharmaceutical companies profiteering from illness works even better. It is this healthcare model that Liberation News advocates.

In fact Marsha Feinland’s platform is not just missing a full socialized medicine program, it is missing another key ingredient. Besides calling for eliminating the private insurance industry through single payer, nowhere in her platform or other materials does she call for the nationalization of the capitalist economy. She has no reference to the expropriation of big oil, industry, and finance capital or even any calls for the nationalization or municipalization of the generation, distribution and sales of electric power. Without such a socialist program it will be impossible to neutralize the power of the capitalist class and meet the needs of the working class.

Liberation News also strongly disagrees with the Peace and Freedom Party’s practice of endorsing Democrats in city elections. In Santa Cruz this has meant that the Peace and Freedom Party has helped elect some of the most anti-worker, anti-homeless, and pro-police oppression Democrats such as Mike Rotkin. Rotten Rotkin publicly opposed the bus drivers when they went on strike, is currently campaigning against a city initiative to raise the minimum wage, has voted for and supported every anti-homeless law in Santa Cruz, and has backed the police in every act of repression, violence, and spying that they have carried out against the left in the city. The local PFP may not support Rotkin anymore, but they did help get him elected, and they continue to help elect other Democrats and Greens in Santa Cruz that have virtually identical programs to that of Rotkin. Liberation News says: No to support for Democrats or Greens in local or national elections! Yes to the socialist candidates!

It will take a massive working class movement for good socialist candidates to actually win elections. An important element of this will be breaking the labor movement from the Democrat Party. By backing the candidates worth voting for today we at Liberation News feel that we are helping build the foundations of that movement today and into the future as people get more and more fed up with capitalist exploitation and wars. Ultimately the ruling class will use ever more violence to try to maintain their grip on power and a revolution will be necessary for the working class to actually seize power and transform society.

Liberation News:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news

Marsha Feinland, California Peace and Freedom Party Candidate for Senate:
http://feinlandforsenate.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Jeff Mackler, California Socialist Action Candidate for Senate:
http://www.socialistaction.org/macklerforsenate/index.html

Todd Cretien, Green Party Candidate for Senate:
http://www.todd4senate.org/

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

I love Beirut

2006-08-29T05:05:32Z

>"I love Beirut for its opposites. I love Beirut because I see a girl in
>a mini skirt and her sister in a tchador. I love Beirut because it is
>neither West nor East it is both. I love Beirut because one can party
>till 6 in the morning and not realize that it is tuesday morning. I love
>Beirut because Beirutis live as if they are going to die tomorrow and
>party as if they are going to live forever.
>
>I love Beirut because I can be swimming in the morning and 30 minutes
>later I'm on the slopes skiing or doing apres ski. I love Beirut because
>I have never seen the sun this strong anywhere in the world.
>
>I love Beirut because I can see 6,000 years of history. I love Beirut
>because Christians and Muslims are living an understanding and do not
>need to have Christian Muslim understanding classes. I love Beirut
>because every Beiruti has a political opinion and will share it with you
>even if you could care less about his and you want to share yours with
>him. I love Beirut for all the conspiracy theories and how many people
>actually believe them.
>
>I love Beirut because any night I can find a friend to go out with. I
>love Beirut because I do not need to call my friends to go and see them
>at their houses I just stop by. I love Beirut because as soon as I
>arirve at one of my friends houses his mom takes me to the kitchen and
>becomes the spokesperson of the refrigerator. I love Beirut because one
>can smell gardenia , and jasmine. I love Beirut because strawberries
>taste like strawberries and fruits taste like fruits. I love Beirut
>because the food is so good that one gains so many pounds even if she
>tries to lose .
>
>I love Beirut because although the Lebanese women at times look alike as
>some did their surgeries at the same plastic surgeon they are the most
>elegant women I have ever seen. I love Beirut because when I go out at
>night I don't know at which women to look at as each one is gorgeous in
>her wn way. I love Beirut because everyone knows me by name.
>
>I love Beirut because I don't have to explain myself. I love Beirut
>because of the traffic jams and the people you meet because of them. I
>love Beirut because of the noise pollution from cars honking.
>
>I love Beirut for the spirituality of the people whether Muslim or
>Christian. I love Beirut because I'm the first to call my Muslim friends
>on Ramadan and they are the first to call me on Easter. I love Beirut
>because on May 1st I see Muslims visiting Harissa ( Virgin Mary ) just
>like I see Christians. I love Beirut because we can differentiate
>between a Jew and an Israeli. I love Beirut because on the 22nd of every
>month I see Muslims going to Mar Charbel and believing that a miracle
>will happen.
>
>I love Beirut because women look like as if they are out of a Vogue
>magazine. I love Beirut because you eat to live and live to eat. I love
>Beirut because one leaves one cafe to go to another and one does this
>all day.
>
>I love Beirut because all the Lebanese living outside want to come back
>and the Lebanese who are in Lebanon envy the ones who are living abroad
>not realizing what it means to live away from Beirut.
>
>I love Beirut because my sister , her husband are there and my niece and
>nephew who are 5 are waiting to see their uncle. I love Beirut because
>my niece asks me to bring her a pink skirt and tells me : "I love You".
>
>I love Beirut because a girl or a guy can easily tell you I just had a
>couple of Lexo or Xanax as if they just had a chewing gum. I love Beirut
>because for every Lebanese we have a singer. I love Beirut because the
>Lebanese star singers sing in nightclubs. I love Beirut because women go
>into the swimming pool with full make up. I love Beirut because guys go
>in with their cigars.
>
>I love Beirut because it has been destroyed 7 times in History andhas
>risen. I love Beirut because since 1975 the Beirutis have withstood the
>PLO , Syrians , and the Israelis. I love Beirut because the Beirutis
>will not accept anyone to occupy them and rule over them. I love Beirut
>because we feel that it is better to die on our feet than to live on our
>knees.
>
>I love Beirut because each street is a two way street even if it is a
>one way officially. I love Beirut because one can park anywhere and not
>get a ticket. I love Beirut because one can go as fast as his
>speedometer.
>
>I love Beirut because MEA lands there. I love Beirut because on MEA we
>can clap in unison when we are about to land. I love Beirut not because
>it is my city , but because it is the city of every Lebanese. I love
>Beirut because it welcomes every exile freethinker , independent mind of
>the Arab world.
>
>I love Beirut because we have hundreds of newspapers and our press is
>finally Free. I love Beirut because most Arabs dreams of coming to
>Beirut and wishes his capital was more like Beirut.
>
>I love Beirut because when I explain Beirut to my Western friends, my
>friends see the passion of Beirut in my eyes. I love Beirut because
>there is so much misconception about Beirut in the media and in the
>minds of people who have never visited. I love Beirut because when I
>tell my friends that I'm going to Beirut they tell me can you take me
>with you.
>
>I love Beirut because we argue over who is going to pay the bill at a
>restaurant as everyone wants to pay it. I love Beirut because although
>many whine about not making enough money everyone is living. I love
>Beirut because if I do the cross before I start driving the person next
>to me does not ask me if I fear that I'm going to get into a car
>accident but instead does his cross as well.
>
>I love Beirut because we accept our differences as we disagree with each
>other. I love Beirut because it serves as a beacon of freedom to the
>rest of the Arab world. I love Beirut because to praphrase what Gibran
>said about Lebanon " Had Beirut not been my city I would have chosen it
>to be." I love Beirut because there is no city like it.
>
>I love Beirut because even if Beirut is being destroyed you are still
>beautiful and will remain beautiful no matter how disfigured you are.
>
>I love Beirut because you are always on my mind.
>
>I love Beirut for no reason. I love Beirut for all the reasons of the
>world.

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Joke from a friend in Lebanon

2006-08-21T11:03:12Z

Queen Elizabeth, Bill Clinton and the Lebanese president died and
went all to hell.
Queen Elizabeth said: I miss England, I wanna
call England and see how everybody is doing there....
She called and talked for about 5 minutes... then she said:
well,devil how much do I owe you ?
The devil goes: 5 million dollars...
5 million dollars?!!!
She made him a check and went to sit
back on her chair....
Bill Clinton was soo jealous, he starts screaming, me too
I wanna call the united States, I wanna see how everybody is doing
too...
He called and talked for about 2 minutes, then he said:
well,devil how much do I
owe you???? The devil goes: 10 million dollars...
10 million dollars?!!!!!!
He made him a check and went to sit back on his chair...
The Lebanese president was extremely soooo jealous too...
he starts screaming and screaming, I wanna.............. call
Lebanon too, I wanna see how everybody is doing there too, I wanna
talk to the ministers, to the deputies,I wanna talk to
everybody...
He called Lebanon and he talked for about twenty hours,he was
talking and tallking and talking... then he said:
well,devil how much do I owe you????
The devil goes: 2$ ...
Only 2 dollars?!!!!!
The devil goes: well, from hell to hell, is local !!

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Current situation for tourists?

2006-08-19T04:07:07Z

You people living in Lebanon: How do you judge the situation right now? Has it calmed down or is there still danger of bombings around the corner? I plan to come to Beirut in about 3 or 4 weeks and need a bit of help deciding if I should book the flight.
And if there's something I can say to calm my parents' nerves, that would be nice as well :-)

posted in Lebanon - 22 replies

POST AS MANY PICS OF LEBANON BEFORE HERE.......

2006-08-17T08:59:38Z

A.S.A.P.

It's important because America the British and Israel will work their propaganda.

Lebanon was beautiful. Let no one forget it.

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

for those who want to help.

2006-08-13T09:56:23Z

for all those of you who want to help lebanon and don't know how.
i suggest you go to this site
http://www.tayyar.org
there is a bank account that you can help through.
or you can contact them and see if there is any brach for them in you country so you can go to their office and see how u can help.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Israel's "new Middle East" by Tanya Reinhart

2006-08-12T23:10:25Z

http://www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/treinhart17.htm

Tanya Reinhart demonstrates that Israel's real aim in Lebanon is to establish the Litani River as its natural border. To realize this, it will first destroy Lebanon, then install a puppet regime and, finally, annex southern Lebanon.

Beirut is burning, hundreds of Lebanese die, hundreds of thousands lose all they ever owned and become refugees, and all the world is doing is rescuing the "foreign passport" residents of what was just two weeks ago "the Paris of the Middle East". Lebanon must die now, because "Israel has the right to defend itself", so goes the US mantra, used to block any international attempt to impose a cease fire.

Israel, backed by the US, portrays its war on Lebanon as a war of self defence. It is easy to sell this message to mainstream media, because the residents of the north of Israel are also in shelters, bombarded and endangered. Israel's claim that no country would let such an attack on its residents go unanswered finds many sympathetic ears. But let us reconstruct exactly how it all started.

On Wednesday, 12 July 2006, a Hezbollah unit attacked two armoured Jeeps of the Israeli army, patrolling along Israel's border with Lebanon. Three Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack and two were taken hostage. At a news conference held in Beirut a couple of hours later, Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, explained that their aim was to reach a prisoner exchange where, in return for the two captured Israeli soldiers, Israel would return three Lebanese prisoners it had refused to release in a previous prisoner exchange. Nasrallah declared that "he did not want to drag the region into war", but added that "our current restraint is not due to weakness... if they [Israel] choose to confront us, they must be prepared for surprises."(1)

The Israeli government, however, did not give a single moment for diplomacy, negotiations or even cool reflection over the situation. In a cabinet meeting that same day, it authorized a massive offensive on Lebanon. As Ha'aretz reported, "In a sharp departure from Israel's response to previous Hezbollah attacks, the cabinet session unanimously agreed that the Lebanese government should be held responsible for yesterday's events." Olmert declared: "This morning's events are not a terror attack, but the act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason and without provocation." He added that "the Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a part, is trying to undermine regional stability. Lebanon is responsible, and Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions." (2)

At the cabinet meeting, "the IDF [Israeli armed forces] recommended various operations aimed at the Lebanese government and strategic targets in Lebanon", as well as a comprehensive attack on southern Lebanon (where Hezbollah's batteries of rockets are concentrated). The government immediately approved both recommendations. The spirit of the cabinet's decision was succinctly summarized by Defence Minister Amir Peretz who said: "We're skipping the stage of threats and going straight to action."(3)

At 2150 that same day, Ha'aretz internet edition reported that, by that time, Israel had already bombarded bridges in central Lebanon and attacked "Hezbollah's posts" in southern Lebanon.(4) An Amnesty International press release of the next day (13 July) stated that, in these attacks, "some 40 Lebanese civilians have reportedly been killed... Among the Lebanese victims were a family of 10, including eight children, who were killed in Dweir village, near Nabatiyeh, and a family of seven, including a seven-month-old baby, who were killed in Baflay village near Tyre. More than 60 other civilians were injured in these or other attacks."

It was at that point, early on Wednesday night, following the first Israeli attack, that Hezbollah started its rocket attack on the north of Israel. Later the same night (before the dawn of Thursday), Israel launched its first attack on Beirut, when Israeli warplanes bombed Beirut's international airport and killed at least 27 Lebanese civilians in a series of raids. In response, Hezbollah's rocket attacks intensified on Thursday, when "more than 100 Katyusha rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon in the largest attack of its sort since the start of the Lebanon war in 1982". Two Israeli civilians were killed in this attack, and 132 were taken to the hospital.(5) When Israel started destroying the Shi'i quarters of Beirut the following day, including a failed attempt on Nasrallah's life, Hezbollah extended its rockets attacks to Haifa.

The way it started, there was nothing in Hezbollah's military act, whatever one may think of it, to justify Israel's massive disproportionate response. Lebanon has had a long-standing border dispute with Israel: in 2000, when Israel, under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, withdrew from southern Lebanon, Israel kept a small piece of land known as the Shaba farms (near Mount Dov), which it claims belonged historically to Syria and not to Lebanon, though both Syria and Lebanon deny that. The Lebanese government has frequently appealed to the US and others for Israel's withdrawal also from this land, which has remained the centre of friction in southern Lebanon, in order to ease the tension in the area and to help the Lebanese internal negotiations over implementing UN resolutions. The most recent such appeal was in mid-April 2006, in a Washington meeting between Lebanon's Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and George Bush.(6) In the six years since Israel withdrew, there have been frequent border incidents between Hezbollah and the Israeli army, and ceasefire violations of the type committed now by Hezbollah have occurred before, initiated by either side, and more frequently by Israel. None of the previous incidents resulted in Katyusha shelling of the north of Israel, which has enjoyed full calm since Israel's withdrawal. It was possible for Israel to handle this incident as all its predecessors, with at most a local retaliation, or a prisoner exchange or, even better, with an attempt to solve this border dispute once and for all. Instead, Israel opted for a global war. As Peretz put it: "The goal is for this incident to end with Hezbollah so badly beaten that not a man in it does not regret having launched this incident [sic]."(7)

The Israeli government knew right from the start that launching its offensive would expose the north of Israel to heavy Katyusha rockets attacks. This was openly discussed at this government's first meeting on Wednesday: "Hezbollah is likely to respond to the Israeli attacks with massive rocket launches at Israel, and in that case, the IDF might move ground forces into Lebanon".(8) One cannot avoid the conclusion that, for the Israeli army and government, endangering the lives of residents of northern Israel was a price worth paying in order to justify the planned ground offensive. They started preparing Israelis on that same Wednesday for what may be ahead: "We may be facing a completely different reality, in which hundreds of thousands of Israelis will, for a short time, find themselves in danger from Hezbollah's rockets," said a senior defence official. "These include residents of the centre of the country."(9) For the Israeli military leadership, not only the Lebanese and the Palestinians, but also the Israelis are just pawns in some big military vision.

The speed at which everything happened (along with many other pieces of information) indicates that Israel has been waiting for a long time for "the international conditions to ripen" for the massive war on Lebanon it has been planning. In fact, one does not need to speculate on this since, right from the start, Israeli and US official sources have been pretty open in this regard. As a senior Israeli official explained to the Washington Post on 16 July, "Hezbollah's cross-border raid has provided a 'unique moment' with a 'convergence of interests'."(10) The paper goes on to explain what this convergence of interests is:

For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East, US officials say.(11)

For the US, the Middle East is a "strategic playing field", where the game is establishing full US domination. The US already controls Iraq and Afghanistan, and considers Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and a few other states as friendly cooperating regimes. But even with this massive foothold, full US domination is still far from established. Iran has only been strengthened by the Iraq war and refuses to accept the decrees of the master. Throughout the Arab world, including in the "friendly regimes", there is boiling anger at the US, at the heart of which is not only the occupation of Iraq, but the brutal oppression of the Palestinians, and the US backing of Israel's policies. The new axis of the four enemies of the Bush administration (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran) are bodies viewed by the Arab world as resisting US or Israel's rule, and standing for Arab liberation. From Bush's perspective, he only has two years to consolidate his vision of complete US control of the Middle East, and to do that, all seeds of resistance should be crushed in a devastating blow that will make it clear to every single Arab that obeying the master is the only way to stay alive. If Israel is willing to do the job and crush not only the Palestinians, but also Lebanon and Hezbollah, then the US, torn from the inside by growing resentment over Bush's wars, and perhaps unable to send new soldiers to be killed for this cause right now, will give Israel all the backing it can. As Rice announced in her visit in Jerusalem on 25 July, what is at stakes is "a new Middle East". "We will prevail," she promised Olmert.

But Israel is not sacrificing its soldiers and citizens only to please the Bush administration. The "new Middle East" has been a dream of the ruling Israeli military circles since at least 1982, when Sharon led the country to the first Lebanon war with precisely this declared goal. Hezbollah's leaders have argued for years that its real long-term role is to protect Lebanon, whose army is too weak to do this. They have said that Israel has never given up its aspirations for Lebanon and that the only reason it pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000 is because Hezbollah's resistance has made maintaining the occupation too costly. Lebanon's people know what every Israeli old enough to remember knows: that, in the vision of Ben Gurion, Israel's founding leader, Israel's border should be "natural", that is, the Jordan River in the East, and the Litani River of Lebanon in the north. In 1967, Israel gained control over the Jordan River, in the occupied Palestinian land, but all its attempts to establish the Litani border have failed so far.

As I argued in Israel/Palestine, already when the Israeli army left southern Lebanon in 2000, the plans to return were ready.(12) But, in Israel's military vision, in the next round, the land should be first "cleaned" of its residents, as Israel did when it occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967, and as it is doing now in southern Lebanon. To enable Israel's eventual realization of Ben Gurion's vision, it is necessary to establish a "friendly regime" in Lebanon, one that will collaborate in crushing any resistance. To do this, it is necessary first to destroy the country, as in the US model of Iraq. These were precisely Sharon's declared aims in the first Lebanon war. Israel and the US believe that now conditions have ripened enough that these aims can finally be realized.

Notes

1. Yoav Stern, "Nasrallah: Only deal will free kidnapped soldiers," Ha'aretz 13 July 2006.

2. Amos Harel, Aluf Benn and Gideon Alon, "Gov't okays massive strikes on Lebanon," Ha'aretz, 13 July 2006.

3. Ibid.

4. Amos Har'el, "Israel prepares for widespread military escalation," Ha'aretz internet edition, Last update - 21:50 12 July 2006.

5. Amos Harel, Jack Khoury and Nir Hasson, "Over 100 Katyushas hit north," Ha'aretz 14 July 2006.

6. "Lebanese PM to lobby President Bush on Israeli withdrawal from Shaba," by Reuters, Ha'aretz, 16 April 2006: "Lebanon's prime minister (is) asking US President George Bush to put pressure on Israel to pull out of a border strip and thus enable his government to extend its authority over all Lebanese land... 'Israel has to withdraw from the Shaba Farms and has to stop violating our airspace and water,' Siniora said. This was essential if the Lebanese government was 'to become the sole monopoly of holding weapons in the country...,' he added. 'Very important as well is to seek the support of President Bush so that Lebanon will not become in any way a ball in the courtyard of others or ... a courtyard for the confrontations of others in the region," Siniora said. Lebanon's rival leaders are engaged in a 'national dialogue' aimed at resolving the country's political crisis, the worst since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war. One key issue is the disarming of Hezbollah... The Shi'i Muslim group says its weapons are still required to liberate Shaba Farms and to defend Lebanon against any Israeli threats."

7. Amos Harel, Aluf Benn and Gideon Alon, "Gov't okays massive strikes on Lebanon', Ha'aretz,13 July 2006.

8.Ibid.

9.Ibid.

10. Robin Wright, "Strikes are called part of broad strategy," Washington Post, Sunday 16 July 2006; A15.

11. Ibid.

12. Tanya Reinhart, Israel-Palestine - how to end the war of 1948, Seven Stories press 2002, 2005, p. 83-87. See "How Israel left Lebanon" (Media articles section, as of Thursday).

*Edited by Mark Marshall
**Tanya Reinhart is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Media Studies at Tel Aviv University and a frequent leader writer for the Israeli evening paper Yediot Ahronot. The second edition of her 2002 book Israel/Palestine: How to end the war of 1948 was published in 2005 (Seven Stories), and her new book: The Road Map to Nowhere, will appear in September (Verso).

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Help me spread cultural awareness to help lebanon

2006-08-10T14:09:22Z

Hello,

I am part of a group that is trying to spread the culture to places that really need it, and I hope to gain enough exposure in these areas to raise money for Lebanon. Any help, advice or suggestions, as well as musicians, dancers, or other artists, etc is greatly appreciated.

I am starting in Hoboken, NJ, a city that desperately needs exposure, and a city with money. With enough support we can hold large fundraising concerts on the Hudson waterfront.
The event pasted below will feature great pro Arabic musicians from the NY area, playing songs from Fairouz to Mohamed Abdel Waheb.

Thank you,
April aka Nissan :)
(Arabic percussionist specializing in riq, and oud and buzuq player)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello All,

You are cordially invited to a fantastic evening of beautiful Arabic music supplied by some of the best professional Arabic musicians in NYC, accompanied by bellydancing! Delicious traditional Arabic food from Paterson will also be served!

For bellydance enthusiasts and students, feel free to bring your "gear" and dance along in the audience. Then join in at 9:30 where everyone can "take stage!" Enjoy the complimentary bellydance lesson provided by the performers and live musicians! Classics by Mohamed Abdel Wahab and the art of taqsim (Arabic soloing) performed live is an excellent learning opportunity and all-around experience for bellydancers!

Come enjoy the real experience! If authentic music, dancing and food is not enough, narghila/hookah is also allowed. There will be a few provided by the house, but bring your own if you have! Additionally, feel free to bring your own shish-bish/backgammon and play before or after the show.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Schedule:
7PM- Dinner is served.
8PM- Live Music and Bellydance Show
9:30- Dance "Free for All" and Free Bellydance Lesson!
10PM on- Dance to recorded music, relax, eat, drink, smoke hookah, play shish bish, enjoy the night however you wish!

Musicians:
April Centrone- riq, mezhar
Tareq Abboushi- buzuq
Zafir Tawil- oud, violin, tabli
Ghaida Hinnawi- vocals

Featured Dancers:
TBA!!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saturday August 26th, 2006
Hoboken, NJ - 219 Monroe Street #1 - Close to PATH train.
$15/$10 w/ student ID.
BYOB (basic wine provided)
BYOH&S- bring your own hookah and shish-bish!

RSVP here: www.hobokencafe.com/bellydance

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Support please.Lights about to go out on Beirut Medical Univ

2006-08-08T09:00:36Z

Please forward and click on the link… the more people who visit the story, the more likely it will be aired on TV and word is spread about the importance of Israelis allowing fuel to enter Lebanon to prevent a MAJOR humanitarian crisis. Also, please post comments saying this story should go on air.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/07/beirut_er_times.html

Note: The emailing party has no affiliation with ABC news or its affiliates.

AUB Medical Center needs help
The fuel in Lebanon is running out and American University of Beirut Medical
Center has only enough reserves to last a week. Seeing that electricity is
barely available, soon the elderly, new-born, injured and sick – including the
St Judes Cancer Children Center – will be in total darkness because of the
Israeli blockade on Lebanon.
No electricity means no more life support, no more medical machines,
no more ER, no more hospital communication and no more health system in Lebanon’s biggest hospital. It is everyone’s duty to help by simply clicking on the link below
(and posting a message on the ABC News blog site) so that ABC Television can
feel the story has enough interest in order to do a news report on it. This
news report would in turn be seen by millions around the world which would
hopefully allow for fuel to be brought into Lebanon solely for the hospitals.

The more “clicks” and message postings the article gets on ABC’s website, the
more leverage it gives to get the story on TV.

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Nizar Qabbani: Beirut is My Love

2006-08-02T23:24:11Z

Hello all,

Here is a poem that the great Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani wrote for Beirut during the civil war. It is interesting to read it in the context in which Beirut finds itself today...

A poem by Nizar Qabbani

Beirut is Your Pleasure Woman,
Beirut is My Love

Forgive us
if we left you to die alone
if we slipped out like runaway soldiers,
pardon us
if we watched you bleed carnelians rivers
and saw adultery performed
but remained silent.

Tell me you’re well,
Beirut in your sadness.
Has the sea too
been killed by a sniper’s bullet?
And love?
Is it now a refugee … among the thousands?
And poetry?
After you Beirut can there still be poetry?
The futility of war has left us butchered,
emptied us of our substance,
scattered our people to the four corners –
pariahs, wasting.
It has left us, against all prophecy, as lost Jews.

They asked us to train as gunmen,
and we declined,
they proposed we divide God in half,
we encountered shame.
We believe in God,
why have they denied him a meaning?
They asked us to testify against love
but we wouldn’t bear witness,
they proposed we curse Beirut
which fed us love and wheat,
provided us with tenderness.
We declined to sever the breast
which had nurtured us.
We opposed the gunmen
and took the side of Lebanon … mountain and valley,
and took the side of Lebanon … cross and crescent,
and supported Lebanon’s fountains and springs,
country of clustering grapes and passion,
and we upheld the place that taught us poetry
and gave us the gift of writing.

We suffered our exile for twenty months
and drank our tears throughout that time
and hunted everywhere for a new love,
but could not love,
and drank wine from all the grapevines
but never grew intoxicated
and looked for a substitute
great Beirut
good Beirut
pure Beirut.
We found none.
We came back and kissed the ground
whose very stones make poetry,
and embraced you, field and birds, sun and corniche,
and screamed like madmen thronging a ship’s deck,
only you Beirut … there’s no other in the world!

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Well at least this woman doesn't want me dead!

2006-08-01T03:43:58Z

Video sent to me by a Lebanese woman:

http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Fisk: Shredded by Cluster Bombs

2006-07-31T16:56:24Z

Shredded by Cluster Bombs

Bush and Blair: "Keep It Up!"

By ROBERT FISK

Beirut.

I dropped by the hospital in Marjayoun this week to find a young girl lying in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, her beauty scarred for ever by some familiar wounds; the telltale dark-red holes in her skin made by cluster bombs, the weapon we used in Iraq to such lethal effect and which the Israelis are now using to punish the civilians of southern Lebanon.

And, of course, it occurred to me at once that if George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and our own sad and diminished Prime Minister had demanded a ceasefire when the Lebanese first pleaded for it, this young woman would not have to spend the rest of her life pitted with these vile scars.

And having seen the cadavers of so many more men and women, I have to say--from my eyrie only three miles from the Israeli border--that the compliant, gutless, shameful refusal of Bush, Rice and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara to bring this bloodbath to an end sentenced many hundreds of innocent Lebanese to death. As I write this near the village of Blat, which has its own little list of civilian dead, it's quite clear that many more innocent Lebanese are being prepared for the slaughter--and will indeed die in the coming days.
What was it Condoleezza Rice said? That "a hasty ceasefire would not be a good thing"? What was Blair's pathetic excuse at the G8 summit? That it was much better to have a ceasefire that would last than one which might break down? Yes, I entirely understand. Blair and his masters--we shall give Rice a generic title to avoid the obvious--regard ceasefires not as a humanitarian step to alleviate and prevent suffering but as a weapon, as a means to a political end.

Let the war last longer and the suffering grow greater—let compassion be postponed--and the Lebanese (and, most laughably, the Hizbollah) will eventually sink to their knees and accept the West's ridiculous demands. And one of those famous American "opportunities" for change--ie for humbling Iran--will have been created.

Hence, in the revolting words of Lord Blair's flunky yesterday, Blair will "increase the urgency" of diplomacy. Think about that for a moment. Diplomacy wasn't urgent at the beginning. Then I suppose it became fairly urgent and now this mendacious man is going to "increase" the urgency of diplomacy; after which, I suppose, it can become super-urgent or of "absolutely" paramount importance, the time decided--no doubt--by Israel's belief that it has won the war against Hizbollah or, more likely, because Israel realizes that it is an unwinnable war and wants us to take the casualties.

Yet from the border of Pakistan to the Mediterranean--with the sole exception of the much-hated Syria and Iran, which might be smothered in blood later--we have turned a 2,500-mile swath of the Muslim world into a hell-disaster of unparalleled suffering and hatred. Our British "peacekeepers" in Afghanistan are fighting for their lives -- and apparently bombing the innocent, Israeli-style -- against an Islamist enemy which grows by the week. In Iraq, our soldiers--and those of the United States--hide in their concrete crusader fortresses while the people they so generously liberated and introduced to the benefits of western-style democracy slash each other to death. And now the US and UK--following Israeli policy to the letter--are allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon and call it peace.

Blair and his ignorant Foreign Secretary have played along with Israel's savagery with blind trust in our own loss of memory. It is perfectly acceptable, it seems, after the Hizbollah staged its July 12 assault, to destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon and the lives of more than 400 of its innocents. But hold on a moment. When the IRA used to cross the Irish border to kill British soldiers--which it did--did Blair and his cronies blame the Irish Republic's government in Dublin? Did Blair order the RAF to bomb Dublin power stations and factories? Did he send British troops crashing over the border in tanks to fire at will into the hill villages of Louth, Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal? Did Blair then demand an international, NATO-led force to take over a buffer zone--on the Irish, not the Northern Ireland side, of the border?

Of course not. But Israel has special privileges afforded to no other nation. It can do exactly what Blair would never have done--and still receive the British Government's approbation. It can trash the Geneva Conventions--because the Americans have done that in Iraq--and it can commit war crimes and murder UN soldiers like the four unarmed observers who refused to leave their post under fire.

The idea that Nasrallah is going to kneel before a Nato general and hand over his sword--that this disciplined, ruthless, frightening guerrilla army is going to surrender to Nato--is a folly beyond self-delusion.
But Blair and Bush want to send a combat force into southern Lebanon. Well, I shall be there, I suppose, to watch its swift destruction in an orgy of car and suicide bombings by the same organization that yesterday fired another new longer-than-ever range missile that landed near Afula in Israel.

The Lebanese government--democratically elected and hailed by a US administration which threw roses at its prime minister after the US state department claimed a "cedar revolution"--has just caught the Americans off guard, producing a peace package to which the Hizbollah has reluctantly agreed, starting with an immediate ceasefire. Can Washington ignore the decision of a democratic government? Of course it can. It is encouraging Israel to continue its destruction of the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza and the West Bank.

So stand by for an "increase" in the "urgency" of diplomacy--and for more women with their skin torn open by cluster bombs.

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07292006.html

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

ISRAEL MASSACRED CHILDREN.

2006-07-31T07:32:59Z

REMINDER: QANA IS A BIBLICAL CITY WHERE JESUS CHRIST MADE HIS FIRST MIRACLE BY CONVERTING WATER INTO WINE, TODAY ISRAEL DECIDED TO KILL ALL THESE INNOCENT PEOPLE...

THANK YOU. NOW QANA WILL BE KNOWN AS A PLACE WHERE ISRAEL MASSACRED CHILDREN.

Deadly Israeli airstrike sparks fury
By KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writer

QANA, Lebanon - An Israeli airstrike Sunday killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where they had taken shelter. The deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of warfare forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cut short a Mideast mission and increased world pressure on the United States to back an end to the fighting.

The stunning bloodshed pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury at the United States flared in Lebanon, which said it no longer would negotiate a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire. U.N. chief Kofi Annan sharply criticized world leaders implicitly Washington for ignoring his previous calls to stop the violence.

The attack in the village of Qana brought Lebanon's confirmed death toll to more than 510. Throughout the day, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the rubble of the three-story building.

Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the 1 a.m. strike brought the building down.

"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said Noor Hashem, 13, whose five siblings were killed.

Noor was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.

Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the campaign to crush Hezbollah would continue, telling Rice it could last another two weeks.

"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," he told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "If necessary, it will be broadened without hesitation."

The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting to debate a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire a step Washington has stood nearly alone at the council in refusing until the disarmament of Hezbollah is assured.

In a jab at the United States, Annan told the council in unusually frank terms he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were ignored.

"Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.

After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora said he told her not to come.

Rice decided to cut her Mideast trip short and return to Washington on Monday morning.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who only days earlier gave his support to the U.S. stance, struck a more urgent note Sunday, saying Washington must work faster to put together the broader deal it seeks.

"We have to get this now. We have to speed this whole process up," Blair said. "This has got to stop and stop on both sides."

But Saniora said talk of a larger peace package must wait until the firing stops.

"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people," he told a gathering of foreign diplomats.

But he underlined that Lebanon stands by ideas for disarming Hezbollah that it put forward earlier this week and that Rice praised.

He took a tough line and hinted that any Hezbollah response to the airstrike in Qana was justified.

"As long as the aggression continues there is response to be exercised," he said, praising Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah said on its Al-Manar television that "the massacre at Qana will not go unanswered."

The largest toll from a single Israeli strike in past weeks was about a dozen and Sunday's dramatic deaths stunned Lebanese. Heightening the anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a halt to an Israeli offensive.

Some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting: "Destroy Tel Aviv! Destroy Tel Aviv!" and chanting for Hezbollah ally Syria to hit Israel. Another protest by about 50 people on a road leading to the U.S. Embassy forced security forces to close the road.

Images of children's bodies tangled in the building's ruins and being carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on Arab news networks. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 women, Lebanese security officials said.

In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother's body taken out on a stretcher.

"Why are they killing us? What have we done?" he screamed.

Israel said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed. Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields."

It said residents had been warned to leave, but Shalhoub and others in Qana said residents were too terrified to take the road out. The road to the nearest main city, Tyre, is lined with charred wreckage and smashed buildings from repeated Israeli bombings.

More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the fighting.

Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah was firing missiles from Qana.

"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV station.

On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into southern Lebanon warned residents their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. Leaflets with similar messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.

Israel on Sunday also launched its second significant ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Before dawn, Israeli forces backed by heavy artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas in the Taibeh Project area, as far as 2.5 miles inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah said eight Israeli soldiers were killed. The Israeli military said only that four soldiers were wounded when guerrillas hit a tank with a missile.

Health Minister Muhammad Jawad Khalifeh said more than 750 Lebanese were believed dead, including more than 200 people buried in the rubble around the south or reported missing.

Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities said.

The U.N. World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the embattled south after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group said. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring relief supplies to Marjayoun.

Many in the Arab world and Europe see the United States as holding the key to the conflict, believing that Israel would stop its offensive sparked by Hezbollah's July 12 abduction of two Israeli soldiers if top ally Washington insisted.

The United States has balked at doing so, saying any cease-fire must ensure real and lasting peace.

Rice came to the Mideast with a peace package calling for disarming Hezbollah, releasing Israel's soldiers, deploying a U.N.-mandated force in south Lebanon and establishing a buffer zone along the border.

Hopes were raised earlier in the week when Hezbollah signed onto a Lebanese government peace plan containing some similar items though it left disarmament and deployment of the international force for later and dependent on conditions. Chief among those conditions was that Israel release Lebanese in its jails and agree to resolve a dispute over a piece of land it holds claimed by Lebanon.

Saniora said those ideas still stand but Lebanon would not discuss them until the fighting stops.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud lashed out at the United States, saying that if it was "serious, it can make Israel cease firing ... They (Americans) are still giving the green light to Israel to continue its aggression against Lebanon."

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

FWD email on Lebanon

2006-07-29T18:07:05Z

1. Lebanon has 18 religious communities,

2. It has 40 daily newspapers,

3. It has 42 universities,

4. It has over 100 banks,

5. 70% of the students are in private schools,

6. 40% of the Lebanese people are Christians (this is the highest percent in all the Arab countries),

7. There's 1 doctor/10 people in Lebanon (In Europe & America, there's 1 doctor per 100 people),

8. The name LEBANON appears 75 times in the Old Testament,

9. The name CEDAR (Lebanon's trees) appears 75 times too in the Old Testament!!! ,

10. Beirut was destroyed and rebuilt 7 times (this is why it's compared to the Phoenix),

11. There's 3.5 Million Lebanese in Lebanon,

12. There's around 10 Million Lebanese outside Lebanon!!! ,

13. There are over 350 Night Clubs in the City of Beirut alone!!! ,

14. The country was occupied by over 16 countries: Egyptians-Hittites- Assyrians- Babylonians- Persians- Alexander the greats Army- the Roman Empire Byzantine- the Arabian Peninsula-The Crusaders- the Ottoman Empire Britain- France- Israel- Syria),

15. Byblos (city in Lebanon) is the oldest, continuously living city in the world,

16. Lebanon's name has been around for 4.000 years non- stop (it's the oldest country/ nation's name in the world!),

17. Lebanon is the only Asian/African country that doesn't have a desert,

18. There are 15 rivers in Lebanon (all of them coming from its own mountains),

19. Lebanon is one of the most populated countries in its archeological sites, in the world!!! ,

20. The first alphabet was created by Cadmus in Byblos (city in Lebanon),

21. The only temple of Jupiter (the main Greek god) is in Baalbeck, Lebanon (The City of the Sun),

22. The name of the BIBLE comes from the name of our city BYBLOS!!! ,

23. Lebanon is the country that has the most books written about it,

24. Lebanon is the only non-dictatorial country in the Arab world (Yes, We do have a President!),

25. Jesus Christ made his 1st miracle in Lebanon, in Sidon (The miracle of turning water into wine),

26. Phoenicians (In Lebanon) built the 1st boat, and they were the first to sail ever!!! ,

27. Phoenicians also reached America long before Christopher Columbus did,

28. The first law school in the world was built in Lebanon, in Downtown Beirut,

29. People say that the Cedars were planted by God's own hands (This is why they're called "The Cedars of God", and this is why Lebanon is called "God's Country on Earth".

NOW DO YOU SEE WHY YOU ARE PROUD TO BE LEBANESE???

posted in Lebanon - 8 replies

Lebanon is 18 different communities

2006-07-28T16:44:53Z

I heard on CNN by Daniel Pipes.

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/195

And I know it's true because I can name some myself:

Marounite Christians: Christians who fall under the Pope.
Melekite Christians
Orthodox
Druze: They looked like the Amish Muslims to me, apparently not *quite* as peaceful.
Shiite Muslims
Sunni Muslims

Each group has their own ideas. It's very difficult for these groups to unite, there are very few things they can all agree on, if any.

And then there is Syria. A very nice Special-Ed teacher I met from Syria said to me, yes Syria does own Lebanon. I was shocked at her audacity after we spent a lovely afternoon together! But hey, look at a map, look at history. It's obvious where the attitude comes from.

Israel & Syria are using Lebanon as a doormat for their war.

Why don't more people who want peace join the United Nations Peacekeeping mission?

http://www.unvolunteers.org/volunteers/volunteerism/index.htm

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Brigitte Gabriel: receives death threats from Fundamentalists

2006-07-27T02:03:04Z

I was impressed by her interveiw on CNN

Her organization:

www.americancongressfortruth.org

How do you feel?

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Tariq Ali: A protracted colonial war

2006-07-25T13:59:59Z

A protracted colonial war

With US support, Israel is hoping to isolate and topple Syria by holding sway over Lebanon

Tariq Ali
Thursday July 20, 2006
The Guardian

In his last interview - after the 1967 six-day war - the historian Isaac Deutscher, whose next-of-kin had died in the Nazi camps and whose surviving relations lived in Israel, said: "To justify or condone Israel's wars against the Arabs is to render Israel a very bad service indeed and harm its own long-term interest." Comparing Israel to Prussia, he issued a sombre warning: "The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase 'Man kann sich totseigen!' 'You can triumph yourself to death'."

In Israel's actions today we can detect many of the elements of hubris: an imperial arrogance, a distortion of reality, an awareness of its military superiority, the self-righteousness with which it wrecks the social infrastructure of weaker states, and a belief in its racial superiority. The loss of many civilian lives in Gaza and Lebanon matters less than the capture or death of a single Israeli soldier. In this, Israeli actions are validated by the US.

The offensive against Gaza is designed to destroy Hamas for daring to win an election. The "international community" stood by as Gaza suffered collective punishment. Dozens of innocents continue to die. This meant nothing to the G8 leaders. Nothing was done.

Israeli recklessness is always green-lighted by Washington. In this case, their interests coincide. They want to isolate and topple the Syrian regime by securing Lebanon as an Israeli-American protectorate on the Jordanian model. They argue this was the original design of the country. Contemporary Lebanon, it is true, still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset - a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority.

The country's confessional chequerboard has never allowed an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim - today perhaps even a Shia - majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the 1970s, providing for the entry of Syrian troops, with tacit US approval, and their establishment there - ostensibly as a buffer between the warring factions, and deterrent to an Israeli takeover, on the cards with the invasions of 1978 and 1982 (when Hizbullah did not exist).

The killing of Rafik Hariri provoked vast demonstrations by the middle class, demanding the expulsion of the Syrians, while western organisations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution. Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal and produce a weak government in Beirut.

But Lebanon's factions remained spread-eagled. Hizbullah had not disarmed, and Syria has not fallen. Washington had taken a pawn, but the castle had still to be captured. I was in Beirut in May, when the Israeli army entered and killed two "terrorists" from a Palestinian splinter group. The latter responded with rockets. Israeli warplanes punished Hizbullah by dropping over 50 bombs on its villages and headquarters near the border. The latest Israeli offensive is designed to take the castle. Will it succeed? A protracted colonial war lies ahead, since Hizbullah, like Hamas, has mass support. It cannot be written off as a "terrorist" organisation. The Arab world sees its forces as freedom fighters resisting colonial occupation.

There are 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli gulags. That is why Israeli soldiers are captured. Prisoner exchanges have occurred as a result. To blame Syria and Iran for Israel's latest offensive is frivolous. Until the question of Palestine is resolved and Iraq's occupation ended, there will be no peace in the region. A "UN" force to deter Hizbullah, but not Israel, is a nonsensical notion.

- Tariq Ali is a veteran political activist since the 1960s. He is a filmmaker, novelist and author of numerous books, including the recently released Street Fighting Years (new edition) and, with David Barsamian, Speaking of Empire & Resistance

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1824423,00.html

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

write to congress

2006-07-24T20:34:54Z

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=8922331

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Baghdad, Ramallah, and now Beirut: all burning

2006-07-24T08:40:48Z

Hello all, here is a letter I just wrote for a local paper here in Toronto, just wanted to share it with you too.

Baghdad, Ramallah, and now Beirut: all burning

The bombing of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon continues, with civilian deaths now close to 400 in the last twelve days. Israel as always is not willing to negotiate or do a prisoner-swap, it prefers bloodshed to peace.

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has arrived in Israel to supposedly quell the fire she is further igniting by providing quick shipments of bombs and ammunition to Israel.

George Bush’s chief of staff Josh Bolton said that an attack on Israel is an attack on the US; “We are allies, and we will support Israel in its right to self-defense”.

But no one is willing to talk to Hezbollah. This is where the fundamental problem lies. The United States and Israel are not willing to talk to any group that they consider “terrorist”. Israel keeps bombing Gaza while refusing to discuss or negotiate any kind of peace deal with Hamas, because it considers Hamas a “terrorist” organization. Political pride comes in the way of negotiating with “terrorists”.

The United States backs Israel and acts in the same way. After 9/11, it chose to bomb Afghanistan rather than try to negotiate with the Taliban. The world would look quite different had they chosen a political rather than a military approach.

Governments have negotiated with resistance groups (which they considered “terrorists”) in the past. It was in 1984, during the rule of Margaret Thatcher, that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England as the Conservative Party conference was in progress. Many of Thatcher’s cabinet members were killed in that attack. In response, Britain could have bombed Dublin, they could have invaded Northern Ireland, but they did not do either. For once they thought rationally and began secret negotiations with the IRA three months after the bombing. They were kept “secret” because again negotiating with “terrorists” supposedly causes a great loss of pride.

Negotiating with Hamas and Hezbollah for a prisoner-swap is the only rational political solution. But rationality is not a trait that the Israeli state has ever possessed. It is now senselessly bombing Lebanon in an effort to draw Iran and Syria into the conflict.

Beirut, the city loved by poets, is now being destroyed again after 15 years of peace. Once the bombing ends, which one hopes will be soon, who will rebuild it? Who will heal these open wounds?

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut

2006-07-23T03:35:46Z

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut
Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?
Published: 19 July 2006
In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.
That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.
Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.
An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."
How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.
I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.
They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.
And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.
I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.
The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.
At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.
Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"
And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.
It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.
But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?
In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."
I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.
As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.
Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.
The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:
My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword;
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.
And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.
I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.
And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.
And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.
Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.
I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.
Then, on my balcony - a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city. "Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."
On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.
Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:
To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Recipe for Disaster

2006-07-21T16:40:47Z

From: http://oream.blogspot.com/

Category: Crockpot cooking
Yield: Endless servings of bulls**t

Ingredients:
4 lbs Palestinian Oppression
2 lbs Palestinian Apartheid and inhumane conditions
2 table spoons(ts) of Hamas extremists (including the original Mossad funded type)
3 oz Hezbollah retaliation
1 large clove of Media Bias towards Israel
2 large ts of stinging IDF attacks10 kilos pre-planned Israeli Air assault
5 cups of globalist agenda
1 Large packet of Apathy and Indifference

Method:

Pour the 5 cups of globalist agenda into a large pot. Add Palestinian oppression, apartheid and inhumane conditions and bring to boil. Stir in Mossad funded Hamas extremism, if regular Hamas extremism does not achieve desired results. Increase heat and add the two tea spoons of IDF attacks. Let it simmer 5 minutes. Now add half a clove of Media Bias until it all starts to smell bad.

Stir the pot and slowly add the Hezbollah retaliation. Now add the disproportionate amount of pre-planned Israeli Air assault. Add the other half clove of media bias until the stench becomes unbearable. Increase heat and let the whole situation cook into an all-out, incontrollable war. Disregard the resulting human death toll of innocent civilians (Palestinians and Israelis), put them in a separate bowl and ignore.

Finally spoon out the contents into a large porcelain serving dish and sprinkle heavily with finally chopped Apathy and Indifference. Add Total Ignorance to taste.

Serves millions

Ensure that all leftovers are sealed in a air-tight bag and placed in the freezer until needed for future attacks on Syria and Iran and served either as cold 'self defense' or spicy (hellish) 'war on terror'.

MMMMM……enjoy!

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Petition to save Lebanese Civilians

2006-07-21T00:33:05Z

I know there is not much weight given to these on-line petitions, at least not in the US, but the site is well done, and worth the visit, even if you don't sign: but I did.

http://epetitions.net/julywar/received.php

posted in Lebanon - 4 replies

Lebanese American Christian perspective

2006-07-17T18:34:09Z

As an American of Lebanese descent, I am truly disgusted by the way my government is handling the current situation in Lebanon. We are a nation that preached democracy yet we do not have any real mediators on the ground. American weapons are now being used to kills innocent civilians in my country of origin.

This problem did not just start yesterday. This has been ongoing for many years. If the Palestinian issue is not dealt with, we cannot solve these ongoing conflicts.

There are thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon because Israel kicked them out when it became a state in 1948. Ever since that happened, the conflict in the Middle East has deepened.

There are many Lebanese as well as Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel on a daily basis for years now (and it is recorded in the UN) {{http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/22f431edb91c6f548525678a0051be1d/e1a542124f1af5328525716c0067b083!OpenDocument}}violates international law by flying over Lebanese sovereign airspace.

It is not about the two Israeli soldiers. Israel has had a five year plan to bomb on Lebanon. Israel knows that Lebanon’s highest tourist season is July and August yet they still bombed the only airport in the country and cut off any possible aid to the civilian population. Lebanon is the size of the state of Maryland, it only has one airport. When a country is blockaded by air and sea, it creates a HUMANITARIAN CRISIS.

As a Lebanese American Christian, I am very frustrated. I have lots of family members in Lebanon that I cannot get a hold of. Israel is not only targeting Hezbollah, they are targeting Lebanese civilian infrastructure. The electricity is down as well as the phone lines. This is a disaster.

Lebanon is a democratic and sovereign nation that is under attack. The last time I spoke to my family, they said they could not get any food because they country is shut down. Now I cannot get a hold of them. Why should they have to pay the price for the acts of a few?

Lebanese Christians and Muslims alike to do agree with Hezbollah actions, but, at the same time, the civilian population does not support the disproportionate Israeli aggression against its innocent people and country.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Hoping everyone and their families and friends are ok.

2006-07-14T07:26:12Z

Stay safe everyone.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Many Americans thank our friends in Lebanon

2006-07-09T23:58:30Z

For stopping terrorists... THANK YOU......

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Lebanese LGBT statement of boycott on World Pride

2006-06-29T13:32:51Z

There is a queer organization in Lebanon, the first of its kind in the Arab world. Here is their statement of boycott on the world pride celebration in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem World Pride 2006:

No Pride in Occupation

World Pride is a global event that aims to bring together sexual minorities from all over the world in order to protest the continued discrimination and violence that they face legally, culturally, politically, and socially. Helem, Lebanese Protection for LGBT, supports the rights of all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people to love and live in freedom, and to demonstrate publicly to demand their rights. However, this July 2006, the unfortunate decision was made to hold World Pride in Jerusalem under the slogan "Love without Borders".

Helem supports the global movement to boycott Jerusalem World Pride 2006 as part of the international boycott of, and divestment from . Helem strongly condemns holding World Pride in a city beleaguered by violence and conflict, and where the words "Love without Borders" belie a reality of separation, ubiquitous borders, destruction of homes and livelihoods, land theft, gross human rights violations, and the apartheid policies of Israel.

Human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent, and the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders should not be placed in competition with the long struggle of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian LGBT people, for self-determination, for the right to return to their homes, and the struggle against apartheid and the occupation of their lands. Helem recognizes that all human rights violations are interconnected and that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. The fight for the rights of sexual minorities is therefore inextricably tied into the fight for all human liberation.

We would also like to state our support of the initiative organized by Aswat (Palestinian Gay Women) and other progressive Palestinian and international organizations, who offered an open invitation to those who decide to come to Jerusalem for World Pride to speak with LGBT Palestinians, visit unrecognized and demolished Palestinian villages, meet with anti-occupation activists, and join an alternative parade demonstrating against the apartheid wall.

Helem's Mission Statement: Helem leads a peaceful struggle for the liberation of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in Lebanon from all sorts of legal, social and cultural discrimination.

Go to Helem's website to learn more about Helem

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Traitor’s self condemnation

2006-03-06T12:31:44Z

http://www.tayyar.org/tayyar/articles.php?article_id=10806&type=opinions

...and still the lebanese poeple follow and believe these poeple, and will elect them the next time.
Whats the secret??

posted in Lebanon - 4 replies

Mallat For President... International Campaign Trail – A Week in the US

2006-02-11T20:13:07Z

"Uncertainty in Lebanon will not be resolved unless there is new leadership that corresponds to the extraordinary revolution of nonviolence that occurred last year. A truly democratic leadership election would bring us back into the democratic process." Chibli Mallat to International Republican Institute in Washington

International Campaign Trail – A Week in the US
From Mallatforpresident Campaign

During an active week of campaigning in the U.S., presidential candidate Chibli Mallat addressed select audiences in New York, New Haven and Washington. He also met prominent Lebanese, UN and US leaders, including MP Saad Hariri and International Republican Institute president Lorne Craner.

Mallat delivered speeches at Yale University (Jan. 20 and 25) in New Haven, Connecticut, in New York City (Jan. 25), and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Jan. 26), the United States Institute of Peace (Jan. 26), and the Heritage Foundation (Jan. 27) in Washington, D. C.

An unprecedented fundraising dinner was organized (Jan. 26) in Manhattan by the Mallat for President US-Lebanese Support Committee with an introduction for the Candidate given by Ray Debbane, CEO of Invus Group, and Chairman of the Committee. Other prominent Lebanese-Americans, including Dr. Gabi Sara, Professor Nada Anid, and the writer Youssef Abd Abdessamad spoke of the new democratic spirit in the candidacy and the campaign. A text of Candidate Mallat on the twinning of the New York and Beirut spirit was prepared for the record, and an active Q and A session followed with some seventy distinguished guests who participated in the fundraising.

Following speeches attended by large audiences at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the United States Institute for Peace, Mallat held a private meeting with Sheikh Saad Hariri on the eve of MP Hariri's meeting with US president George W. Bush. Hariri and Mallat discussed plans to restore democracy in Lebanon in the light of the UN Security Council unanimous Presidential Statement, which insisted on the need to fulfil the UNSCR 1559 'presidency clause'. Mallat also met with Deputy Speaker of the Parliament Farid Makari, MP Bassem Sabee, and with lead members of Hariri’s team.

Two other meetings included a business lunch at the UN on January 18, a few days before the UN Security Council Presidential; and a working session with Lorne Craner, President of the International Republican Institute. Craner praised "Lebanon is an inspiration to people in the Middle East and the world", and reiterated IRI's commitment to democracy worldwide. Mallat stressed during the meeting that there would be no exit from the deadlocked situation in Lebanon unless a new president, one capable of connecting with the non-violent Cedar revolution, is elected, also emphasising the need to prioritize presidential change over the decommissioning of arms.

Booklet on the US week, including speeches, press releases and important press coverage is available with the Mallat for president Campaign team, coordinator@mallat.com

posted in Lebanon - 6 replies

The Network of Arab-American Professionals Presents...

2006-02-03T17:59:29Z

Everyone, this is completely off topic but if you are in the Los Angeles Area, please support our event!!! Thanks ;-)

The Network of Arab American Professionals--Los Angeles Chapter

Presents....

The Best Middle Eastern Beats

With Bay Area’s finest Arab American DJ

DJ NADER

At the Bungalow Club
7174 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Thursday February 23, 2006

10 PM-2 AM 21 & over

Get your tickets today!!! Please call:

1-866-WAN-TIXX
1-866-926-8499
www.wantickets.com/

Advanced tickets $20 Door Tickets $30**

**Limited Capacity, this show will SELL OUT…Buy your tickets TODAY!

For more info on DJ Nader please visit:

www.djnader.com/index.shtml

The Network of Arab-American Professionals (NAAP) is a community of Arabs and Arab- Americans working in a number of professions. Through the efforts of our members, we work to promote our common Arab heritage and culture, to serve our communities through outreach programs, to support the Arab student movement, to provide opportunities for professional networking, and to advance the common interests of the larger Arab community by empowering, protecting and promoting its political causes and interests in the US and abroad throughout all levels of society. www.naaponline.org/default.asp

Lara Maxey
NAAP-LA Coordinator

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Beauty secrets, herbal remedies, baby care

2006-02-03T16:36:01Z

a compilation is being created!

Please distribute widely.

A Call for Our Mothers' Memories

From the land of our births,
From the land of our mothers
We carry with us
Their secrets, their wisdom and their ways.

We carry treasures to share
And so we call out from the highest mountains,
And we call out from the low valleys,
We call out from our homes,
From our families,
From our everyday lives,
From our mothering hearts and from our centered beings,
We call out from the lands of our diaspora,
And from our desire to keep these fires alive.

We call out for our mothers' truths
And we call out to you
To bring to us
Your memories, your mothers' and grandmothers' wisdom, stories and secrets
For beauty, babies and healing.

This is a call for submissions for a compilation of "recipes" for beauty tips, baby care, and herbal and natural healing remedies from the women of Arab countries and cultures.

Please submit your recipes, including specific details on preparation, measurements, storage/expiration dates, cautions, etc. as well as instructions on usage. If you can use both the English and Arabic word for your ingredients that is preferred, but not necessary. Submissions are preferred as text only, in the body of an email message, and not as an attached document.

We also invite contributors/participants in this project to write a small piece (less than 500 words) about their memories in learning or using their recipes, to share stories related to your experiences, or to give some background history or folklore on the recipes or ingredients.

Please include your name, your family's country of origin, and your current location so that we can credit you. (If you prefer that your name not be used, we will publish your piece anonymously.) Also include contact information (preferably email and phone) with your recipe, so that we can get in touch with you if we have questions. In the cases of multiple submissions of a similar recipe, the editors may choose the one that best clarifies its composition and purpose, or may combine two or more for a comprehensive recipe/usage/history/story.

Submissions may be sent to ourmothersmemories@yahoo.com

Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Mallat For President...

2006-01-25T16:34:10Z

Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Breaking the dykes that pen in Arab democracy

By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff

The respected lawyer, professor and democracy activist Chibli Mallat is running for president of Lebanon, at a time when no presidential election has been officially declared, in a system in which Parliament chooses the president. Succeed or not, his candidacy is worthy because he is challenging, and may help to change, two core enigmas of the modern Arab world and its bizarre political order: why executive power remains in the hands of the same person for many years; and why individual citizens feel helpless and angry, but do not try seriously to change their unsatisfactory autocratic systems.

Mallat's candidacy provides a rare example of how individuals can instigate change by demanding that those who wield power should be held accountable to the law. It also affirms the novel idea that any Arab citizen can aspire to become president through democratic political action and personal initiative.

This is not new ground for Mallat, who has a track record in challenging political impunity by leaders throughout the Middle East. He actively and publicly campaigned for years against the practices of leaders like Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

He was one of a handful of lawyers who took the daring step in June 2001 of filing a criminal complaint in a Belgian court on behalf of 28 witnesses and survivors of the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, which resulted in the brutal death of between 700 and several thousand Palestinian civilians. The suit charged Israel's Ariel Sharon and Amos Yaron, and several members of a Lebanese Christian militia, with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mallat and colleagues had made their point on the global stage: political impunity and wanton killing of any people, by any people, was unacceptable and had to be ended.

Sharon's name will forever be linked with the Sabra and Shatila massacres, partly due to this legal action. Five books have been written on the "Sharon case" in Belgium, including a splendid volume of essays edited by John Borneman of Princeton University. Entitled "The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction," it was published in 2004 by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

I visited Mallat in his office last week to find out more about his motivation and expectations in running for president, assuming that his candidacy was something of a long shot. Yet, like the Sharon case in Belgium, I also knew that Mallat's political activism and legal initiatives tended to anchor a specific local event in its much wider, often universal, moral and constitutional context. In this case, the core issue was one he had been writing and speaking about for years: the crucial constitutional rotation of presidential power.

Mallat the EU Jean Monnet Professor of Law at St. Joseph University in Beirut, sees his candidacy as a logical continuation of the same legal and ethical principles leading to the demand that the Sabra and Shatila killers be held accountable. No person, group or country was above the law. All had to be held accountable for their transgressions. Impunity was intolerable.

He, like a majority of Lebanese, was outraged in autumn 2004 when Syria unilaterally extended the six-year mandate of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud for another three years. Mallat saw this as further foreign interference in Lebanon's domestic affairs, making the extension "illegitimate and unconstitutional because it reflected external coercion ... and therefore it must be reversed." Mallat also believes that many of the assassinations, threats and explosions that have rocked Lebanon since autumn 2004 are linked to Lahoud's extension.

"We have to reverse the presidential extension through more than just talk or political pressure," he told me; "We must create a real, viable alternative to unseat Lahoud."

So he launched his campaign, a very organized affair, with a Web site updated daily, media releases, local and international support committees, position papers, regular press interviews and public lectures, and a complete action plan for national political renewal. He meets regularly with politicians, members of Parliament, and small groups of interested citizens. Win or lose, he sees his candidacy in the wider context of the urgent need to change political culture throughout the Arab world.

"We have to promote democracy in the Arab world by ensuring that power at the top of the executive branch rotates regularly. We must unblock the hold of power at the top of our systems. In this case, Parliament has a duty to reverse the president's term extension and unseat Lahoud," he says.

He also feels that his candidacy has triggered two other important ideas: "The dyke has broken on the idea that a normal Arab citizen cannot aspire to compete for the top post in the country," and "we insist on ending the norm that governments or officials can get away with killing people."

How sensible, how long overdue, and how unsurprising that it should be a single man of the law in little Lebanon that translates these ideas into action. This strikes me as a candidacy not only worth watching, but also worth emulating in other Arab lands. We need to break more dykes.

Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

Visit http://www.mallatforpresident.com

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Hariri's son to meet Pres. Bush...

2006-01-24T19:41:43Z

The son of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, arrives in Washington Monday for a five day visit to the United Sates which will include a meeting with President Geroge W. Bush. Saad ad-Din Hariri leads the anti-Syrian coalition that won Lebanon's June 2005 elections, the first to be held without a Syrian military presence in the country in almost 30 years. Accoriding to officials of Hariri's political movement "The Future" the purpose of the visit is to win US support for the creation of an international tribunal to try those accused of murdering his father in a 14 February 2005 bombing in Beirut.

A UN probe has implicated top Lebanese and Syrian security officials in the attack which killed 22 people.

Hariri is also scheduled to visit the UN headquarters in New York where he is expected to endorse a US-French proposal for a declaration urging the application of UN Security Council 1559 which calls for the disarming of all militias in Lebanon.

The Lebanese politician will also meet World Bank president James Wolfensohn as well as US business leaders to try and secure economic aid and investments for the Lebanese economy. Hariri will be accompanied during the trip by the seputy speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Farid Makari.

http://lebaneselobby.org/

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Zahle

2005-12-30T23:11:15Z

Hi, I'm not Lebanese so please excuse the intrusion.

I heard a song by the great Wael Kfoury a couple of weeks ago and was told that it's called 'Zahle' or 'Zahla' which I believe is a town in Lebanon. I love it and was wondering if anyone could tell me anything about the lyrics to it?
Thanks, Saviya

posted in Lebanon - 7 replies

No Mourning in Hezbollah areas

2005-12-15T18:19:42Z

Nineteen-year-old Samer Qays, on Wednesday refused to join the thousands who on turned out to pay their last respects to murdered anti-Syrian politician Gibran Tueni. While Beirut's Christian districts came to a standstill for the funeral procession, life in the city's eastern, mostly Hezbollah dominated areas, like Qays's neighbourhood Haret Hreik, went on as usual. "Joining the procession today means believing the lies fabricated by the Israelis and the Americans," said Qays.

"Our martyrs are not those who work for the Americans," he said, pointing to the photographs of Hezbollah fighters killed in clashes with the Israeli army

"Syria has nothing to do with the attack against that journalist (Tueni), it is Israel that killed him."

Sharing this view is Abu Abbas, 67, a Shiite Muslim jeweller, whose shop is situated in the main street of Ghbeiri, a district near to Haret Hreik.

"Israel is behind all this, there is no doubt on that," says Abu Abbas, adding that it is the "Israelis who want to control Lebanon," and not the Syrians.

But another Ghbeir resident, Wassim al-Utr, 35, disagrees. "I think it was the Syrians [who killed Tueni]. Syria will not leave the country (Lebanon) without leaving it in flames".

Falafel vendor, Yusuf Kradiye, 31, a Sunni Muslim admits he does not know for certain who was behind the bomb attack that killed Tueni on Monday. "There are many who could profit from the attack. Maybe the Syrians, but also others. After all something seems wrong. It would be stupid for Syria to kill like this and leave its signature all over the place."

Some people chose to give more practical and less political reasons for not turning out with those laying Tueni to rest.

"How can I close my shop when we have been in an economic crisis for months? I work 14 hours a day and it's still not enough," said Yusuf Kradiyye.

Tueni was killed together with his driver and bystander when a bomb exploded in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Monday, the third political murder since former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in February.

The 48-year-old Tueni, was known for his scathing criticism of Syria's meddling in Lebanese politics, which he frequently denounced from the editorial pages of his an-Nahar newspaper, Lebanon's leading daily. Tueni recently moved to Paris after revealing that he had received death threats and believed he was on a hit-list. He was back in Beirut this week for what was meant to be a short visit.

Many Lebanese politicians have blamed Syria for Tueni's murder, but Damascus has denied any involvement.

http://www.lebaneselobby.com/

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Amani of Lebanon

2005-12-06T21:36:39Z

Just wanted to let you all know Amani has a tribe, too!

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

A Profile in Courage

2005-11-30T18:56:23Z

Prominent Lebanese journalist May Chidiac made a triumphant return to the airwaves this week, two months after surviving an assassination attempt which resulted in the loss of her arm and leg. Chidiac is an anchor for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation and is one of the most well-known and highly regarded members of the country’s press. On the day of the attack, she had hosted a program discussing the ongoing United Nations investigation of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Promising that she will not be deterred from speaking out, Chidiac thanked supporters and ended saying, “I am going to get…an arm, a leg, whatever. I miss you and it won’t be long before we meet again.” The blast was the latest in a series of bombings since the Hariri assassination targeting political figures and journalists, including an explosion which killed outspoken An Nahar journalist Samir Kassir.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Ghazi Kanaan commits suicide

2005-11-26T21:17:38Z

Witnesses declare "he ran himself over with his car"

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Paradice Now..

2005-11-23T00:42:44Z

Please support this movie called Paradice Now...

For locations, press on this link:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:izdnrTj4dwkJ:movies.aol.com/movie/main.adp%3Fmid%3D21989+Paradise+now+movie+locations&hl=en

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Rove's White House 'Murder, Inc.'

2005-11-08T20:16:55Z

Special Report
Rove's White House 'Murder, Inc.'
By Wayne Madsen Online Journal Contributing Writer

On September 15, 2001, just four days after the 9-11 attacks, CIA Director George Tenet provided President [sic] Bush with a Top Secret "Worldwide Attack Matrix"-a virtual license to kill targets deemed to be a threat to the United States in some 80 countries around the world. The Tenet plan, which was subsequently approved by Bush, essentially reversed the executive orders of four previous U.S. administrations that expressly prohibited political assassinations.

According to high level European intelligence officials, Bush's counselor, Karl Rove, used the new presidential authority to silence a popular Lebanese Christian politician who was planning to offer irrefutable evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorized the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.

In addition, Sharon provided the Lebanese forces who carried out the grisly task. At the time of the massacres, Elie Hobeika was intelligence chief of Lebanese Christian forces in Lebanon who were battling Palestinians and other Muslim groups in a bloody civil war. He was also the chief liaison to Israeli Defense Force (IDF) personnel in Lebanon. An official Israeli inquiry into the massacre at the camps, the Kahan Commission, merely found Sharon "indirectly" responsible for the slaughter and fingered Hobeika as the chief instigator.

The Kahan Commission never called on Hobeika to offer testimony in his defense. However, in response to charges brought against Sharon before a special war crimes court in Belgium, Hobeika was urged to testify against Sharon, according to well-informed Lebanese sources. Hobeika was prepared to offer a different version of events than what was contained in the Kahan report. A 1993 Belgian law permitting human rights prosecutions was unusual in that non-Belgians could be tried for violations against other non-Belgians in a Belgian court. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the law was severely amended and the extraterritoriality provisions were curtailed.

Hobeika headed the Lebanese forces intelligence agency since the mid-1970s and he soon developed close ties to the CIA. He was a frequent visitor to the CIA's headquarters at Langley, Virginia. After the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1990, Hobeika held a number of cabinet positions in the Lebanese government, a proxy for the Syrian occupation authorities. He also served in the parliament. In July 2001, Hobeika called a press conference and announced he was prepared to testify against Sharon in Belgium and revealed that he had evidence of what actually occurred in Sabra and Shatilla. Hobeika also indicated that Israel had flown members of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) into Beirut International Airport in an Israeli Air Force C130 transport plane. In full view of dozens of witnesses, including member of the Lebanese army and others, SLA troops under the command of Major Saad Haddad were slipped into the camps to commit the massacres. The SLA troops were under the direct command of Ariel Sharon and an Israeli Mossad agent provocateur named Rafi Eitan.

Hobeika offered evidence that a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon was aware of the Israeli plot. In addition, the IDF had placed a camera in a strategic position to film the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. Hobeika was going to ask that the footage be released as part of the investigation of Sharon.

After announcing he was willing to testify against Sharon, Hobeika became fearful for his safety and began moves to leave Lebanon. Hobeika was not aware that his threats to testify against Sharon had triggered a series of fateful events that reached well into the White House and Sharon's office.

On January 24, 2002, Hobeika's car was blown up by a remote controlled bomb placed in a parked Mercedes along a street in the Hazmieh section of Beirut. The bomb exploded when Hobeika and his three associates, Fares Souweidan, Mitri Ajram, and Waleed Zein, were driving their Range Rover past the TNT-laden Mercedes at 9:40 am Beirut time. The Range Rover's four passengers were killed in the explosion In case Hobeika's car had taken another route through the neighborhood, two additional parked cars, located at two other choke points, were also rigged with TNT. The powerful bomb wounded a number of other people on the street Other parked cars were destroyed and buildings and homes were damaged. The Lebanese president, prime minister, and interior minister all claimed that Israeli agents were behind the attack.

It is noteworthy that the State Department's list of global terrorist incidents for 2002 worldwide failed to list the car bombing attack on Hobeika and his party. The White House wanted to ensure the attack was censored from the report. The reason was simple: the attack ultimately had Washington's fingerprints on it.

High level European intelligence sources now report that Karl Rove personally coordinated Hobeika's assassination. The hit on Hobeika employed Syrian intelligence agents. Syrian President Bashar Assad was trying to curry favor with the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9-11 and was more than willing to help the White House. In addition, Assad's father, Hafez Assad, had been an ally of Bush's father during Desert Storm, a period that saw Washington give a "wink and a nod" to Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Rove wanted to help Sharon avoid any political embarrassment from an in absentia trial in Brussels where Hobeika would be a star witness. Rove and Sharon agreed on the plan to use Syrian Military Intelligence agents to assassinate Hobeika. Rove saw Sharon as an indispensable ally of Bush in ensuring the loyalty of the Christian evangelical and Jewish voting blocs in the United States. Sharon saw the plan to have the United States coordinate the hit as a way to mask all connections to Jerusalem.

The Syrian hit team was ordered by Assef Shawkat, the number two man in Syrian military intelligence and a good friend and brother in law of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Assad's intelligence services had already cooperated with U.S. intelligence in resorting to unconventional methods to extract information from al Qaeda detainees deported to Syria from the United States and other countries in the wake of 9-11. The order to take out Hobeika was transmitted by Shawkat to Roustom Ghazali, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Beirut. Ghazali arranged for the three remote controlled cars to be parked along Hobeika's route in Hamzieh.

The plan to kill Hobeika had all the necessary caveats and built-in denial mechanisms. If the Syrians were discovered beforehand or afterwards, Karl Rove and his associates in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans would be ensured plausible deniability.

Hobeika's CIA intermediary in Beirut, a man only referred to as "Jason" by Hobeika, was a frequent companion of the Lebanese politician during official and off-duty hours. During Hobeika's election campaigns for his parliamentary seat, Jason was often in Hobeika's office offering support and advice. After Hobeika's assassination, Jason became despondent over the death of his colleague. Eventually, Jason disappeared abruptly from Lebanon and reportedly later emerged in Pakistan.

Karl Rove's involvement in the assassination of Hobeika may not have been the last "hit" he ordered to help out Sharon. In March 2002, a few months after Hobeika's assassination, another Lebanese Christian with knowledge of Sharon's involvement in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres was gunned down along with his wife in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A bullet fired at Michael Nassar's car flattened one of his tires. Nassar pulled into a gasoline station for repairs. A professional assassin, firing a gun with a silencer, shot Nassar and his wife in the head, killing them both instantly. The assailant fled and was never captured Nassar was also involved with the Phalange militia at Sabra and Shatilla. Nassar was also reportedly willing to testify against Sharon in Belgium and, as a nephew of SLA Commander General Antoine Lahd, may have had important evidence to bolster Hobeika's charge that Sharon ordered SLA forces into the camps to wipe out the Palestinians.

Based on what European intelligence claims is concrete intelligence on Rove's involvement in the assassination of Hobeika, the Bush administration can now add political assassination to its laundry list of other misdeeds, from lying about the reasons to go to war to the torture tactics in violation of the Geneva Conventions that have been employed by the Pentagon and "third country" nationals at prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He served in the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Reagan administration and wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." His forthcoming book is titled: "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Visiting Lebanon!

2005-10-12T18:40:25Z

I will be visiting Lebanon during the Christmas/New Year Holiday season. Does anyone have any advice that would help me while I'm there? Thanks!

- Mark

posted in Lebanon - 5 replies

Breaking news...

2005-10-10T23:42:16Z

Hariri killing suspects charged

A Lebanese prosecutor has charged four pro-Syrian generals detained earlier this week in connection with the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The head of an international probe into the killing - who ordered the arrests - said the four were suspected of planning the murder.

But Detlev Mehlis said that they were only part of the picture, and that more investigation was needed.

Hariri's supporters blamed the murder on Syria, but Damascus denies this.

Lebanon's political landscape was transformed by his death and the event led to the withdrawal of Syrian forces from the country.

Those charged are:

Maj Gen Jamil al-Sayyad, former head of General Security

Maj Gen Ali Hajj, former chief of police

Brig Gen Raymond Azar, former military intelligence chief

Mustafa Hamdan, Republican Guard commander.
Mr Mehlis' mandate from the UN Security Council ends on 15 September.

He has indicated that this may be extended for the completion of his investigation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4206530.stm

posted in Lebanon - 8 replies

New Sources

2005-09-07T10:17:51Z

http://www.masternewmedia.org/2001/12/31/70_free_alternative_and_independent_online_news_sources.htm#newssource5

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

A Syrian hit list

2005-08-30T17:59:50Z

Bashar Al Assad gambled his future when he forced the Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri to change the constitution in order to extend president Lahoud's term by another 3 years. The subsequent assassination of Hariri led to forcing Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon.

The so called Syria's hit list is an act of revenge against all the Lebanese political leaders and Journalists that opposed the extension of Lahoud's term... Starting with Marwan Hamade's attempted assassination and ending (so far) with George Hawi's murder.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/06/a_syrian_hit_li.php

posted in Lebanon - 56 replies

Here we go again...

2005-08-23T21:31:31Z

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - A powerful explosion late Monday rocked a shopping center and hotel in the Zalka neighborhood in north Beirut, injuring at least three people and causing extensive damage, security officials said.

Heavily armed Lebanese soldiers cordoned off the area, punching and hitting journalists to keep them back.

Two workers could be seen helping a black-clad, veiled woman down the glass-covered front stairs of the Promenade Hotel. She appeared shaken but not injured. Shattered glass and plaster filled the hotel lobby, but no residents were hurt.

Brig. Gen. Darwish Hobeika, Lebanon's Civil Defense Corps commander, told Lebanese Broadcasting that two people were lightly injured and one Civil Defense rescuer was hurt.

The explosion shattered the windows of several apartment buildings and blew shutters off dozens of luxury boutiques in the neighborhood. Black smoke billowed high in the night sky, but there was no fire.

Aluminum siding and roofing in the shopping center buckled. The state-run National New Agency estimated the explosion was caused by 45 pounds of TNT.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5226860,00.html

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Lebanese Deputy P.M. Wounded in Blast

2005-08-19T18:01:22Z

BEIRUT, Lebanon - A car bomb hit the motorcade of Lebanon's outgoing deputy prime minister Tuesday, wounding him and killing at least one other person, officials said. A string of bombings has hit Lebanon this year, but this was the first aimed at a pro-Syrian politician.

The blast left one vehicle a charred and twisted wreck and damaged several others in the motorcade of Elias Murr, who is also the outgoing defense minister. Murr, who was slightly wounded, later released an audiotape from the hospital saying his was all right. At least 12 other people, including the Mexican ambassador's wife, were also wounded, officials said.

President Emile Lahoud, Syria's staunchest ally in Lebanon, has reportedly been pressing for Murr — his son-in-law — to be given a position in the new government that anti-Syrian politicians are trying to put together. The anti-Syrian coalition that now controls parliament is trying to form a Cabinet without influence from Damascus' allies.

Murr has also been in conflict with Muslim militants after announcing last year the capture of a cell plotting attacks on foreign embassies and diplomats. One of the militants arrested in that sweep, an alleged al-Qaida leader, died in police custody.

The midmorning blast, which reverberated across the Lebanese capital, took place in the northern district of Naqash on a road Murr routinely takes from his residence in Rabiya to Beirut. The area has numerous villas, foreign embassies and diplomatic residences near the blast site.

A vehicle packed with explosives went off as Murr's motorcade passed, police said. The explosion knocked out a 6-foot-wide crater in the pavement and flung the booby-trapped vehicle over the stone wall of an adjacent villa. Murr's smashed car came to rest several yards from the crater.

Murr, who had been driving his own car, staggered out of his damaged vehicle, bloodied and leaning on passers-by who rushed to help, witnesses told Lebanese television.

In another car, a member of his escort, his abdomen and face bloodied, was screaming in agony. The wounded man, conscious, wept as he was pulled out of the front passenger seat through the vehicle's roof.

Speaking from his hospital bed later, Murr said: "Thank God, it's OK ... The country is going through a difficult period and we all have to bear that."

Murr's father, longtime politician Michel Murr, said his son had suffered wounds in the face and burns in his legs and arms and was currently in the operating room. "I want to assure you that his life is not in danger," he told reporters at the hospital, where Lahoud and other politicians went to check on his condition.

The state-run National News Agency said one person was killed and six wounded, including an army colonel and the ambassador's wife. Police put the number of wounded at 13.

Syria strongly denounced the assassination attempt against Murr, saying "this terrorist act is a new circle in the series of explosions and assassinations that aim at destabilizing Lebanon and weakening its national unity."

A statement carried by Syria's official news agency SANA said the "perpetrators are intricately connected to Lebanon's enemies and to the enemies of stability in the region."

Murr is the fifth person to be targeted for assassination over the past year — but the first pro-Syrian among them to be hit.

The other attacks have targeted leading critics and political opponents of Damascus — most notably former prime minister Rafik Hariri, killed in a Feb. 14 blast. Anti-Syrian politicians accused the Syrian government and its allies in the Lebanese intelligence services of seeking to kill its rivals in Lebanon.

In September, Murr — the interior minister at the time — announced he uncovered an al-Qaida-linked plot to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, assassinate Western diplomats and attack Lebanese security facilities.

Ten people were arrested, including Ismail Mohammed al-Khatib, who authorities claimed was the leader of an al-Qaida network in Lebanon. Al-Khatib died in police custody — of a heart attack, according to officials — but his followers blame authorities for his death.

In October, former economy minister Marwan Hamadeh survived a car bomb explosion with serious injuries. His bodyguard was killed. Hariri's assassination in February led to mass anti-Syrian protests and intensified international pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its army from Lebanon in April.

But even after the Syrian withdrawal, bombings continued. Anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir and former Communist Party leader George Hawi were killed in separate bombings of their cars in June.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050712/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_explosion

posted in Lebanon - 8 replies

'No Dialogue with Hezbollah'

2005-08-18T20:39:49Z

Beirut, Lebanon - General Aoun told the Beirut daily Al Balad that there was no possibility of any dialogue between his Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah, which has established a state within the state and imposed certain political dictums about which it rejects any debate.

Aoun also said that he, along with 3 other Lebanese leaders are being targeted for assassination. Aoun, a Maronite Christian said the other 3 leaders are Muslim. Aoun further speculated that the murder of any of the four Lebanese leaders could result in a "nationwide insurrection ".

Aoun did not name the three other Muslim political leaders marked for assassination. The local media has in the past speculated that Walid Jumblatt and Saad Hariri are on Syria's hit list.

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/08/general_aoun_no.php

posted in Lebanon - 5 replies

'Government must get priorities straight'

2005-08-16T03:52:42Z

Hizbullah declares Gaza pullout true victory for the Palestinians and resistance in the region

BEIRUT: Hizbullah's Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah called on the Lebanese government to "set its priorities straight," and declared the Gaza pullout a "true victory" for the Palestinians and armed resistance in the region.

Having been at the center of an international controversy concerning the group's disarmament, Nasrallah chose to focus his attention on the domestic sphere, calling on the Lebanese government to "identify with its citizens" and help them regain faith in their government.

"The government shouldn't limit itself to gaining confidence from its members of Parliament, it should strive to gain the people's confidence by addressing their concerns and needs such as being able to feel safe in their country and trusting in its security apparatus," he said during a ceremony to celebrate the opening of a mosque in Baalbek.

Nasrallah, whose party has established an extensive network of social and educational services entirely separate from the government, said: "The Lebanese government should focus and carefully find solutions to the current social, economic and security crisis."

Later in the day, Nasrallah met with the Qatar's Energy Minister Abdullah al-Attieh and Energy and Water Minister of Mohammad Fneish to discuss possible "cooperation and the exchange of energy and fuel" between the two countries.

"The discussions went well, and I think Hizbullah's entry into the Lebanese government has been a very positive step for Lebanon as the group is realistic and always studies the political situation very thoroughly," said Attieh after the meeting.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=17673

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Clinton vs. Pirro

2005-08-14T02:06:42Z

(My dad just told me that Ms. Pirro is Lebanese so I thought that was cool!)

Hours after Ms. Pirro entered the race, state Republicans appeared to be rallying around her. Yesterday, Mr. Pataki called Ms. Pirro "an outstanding candidate," and he has told associates that she is the strongest kind of Republican to run against Mrs. Clinton - an ethnic Catholic woman from the suburbs who is moderate on social issues and espouses a hard-edged, zero-tolerance line on law enforcement and security issues. (Ms. Pirro is of Lebanese descent.)

A Clinton-Pirro race is one that New York Republicans have sought for months. In June, 46 of the 62 Republican county leaders signed a letter urging Ms. Pirro to challenge Mrs. Clinton. But Mr. Minarik emphasized yesterday that he was not sure if all 46 would endorse Ms. Pirro, and at least two Republican chairmen said they were seriously evaluating Mr. Cox. The state party hopes to settle on a Republican challenger by later this year to avoid convention and primary battles next summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/nyregion/metrocampaigns/09pirro.html?pagewanted=print

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

the lebanese mafia in st. louis.

2005-08-09T19:51:53Z

i was out with the girl i am currently seeing who is of partial Lebanese descent. She told me when her grandfather came to St. Louis, she said he had to deal with the Lebanese mafia. I was wondering if anyone here has heard of anything like this?

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Iran: helping Leb. economically?

2005-08-02T17:20:00Z

Beirut , Lebanon- Iranian Ambassador Masoud Idrisi Karmanchahi has recently been very active in promoting a new image for Iran in Lebanon. He has been busy traveling the country and meeting key officials.

In all his meetings, he has been stressing support for Lebanon.

During a meeting yesterday with Lebanese Minister of Energy and Water Mohammed Fneish, Idrisi voiced his country's readiness to help solve Lebanon's electricity shortage.

Fneish, a Hezbollah member and a member of the new Lebanese parliament is eager to solve the problem of Electric utility company.

The Lebanese in general think of Iran as the arms and financial supporter of Hezbollah only. But if Iran really wants to help all Lebanon, it can. Iran is second only to Saudi Arabia as an oil producer in the Middle East and can for a start afford to give Lebanon a break on the price of oil in the form of a subsidy, until Lebanon can get on its feet and solve the problems of the Electricity company; corruption being the no.1 problem

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/07/is_iran_really.php

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

religion in lebanon

2005-08-02T17:17:13Z

............

posted in Lebanon - 28 replies

Arab Americans Take the Lead in Foreign Affairs

2005-07-30T01:07:45Z

Arab American Members of Congress took the lead on foreign affairs this week. Congressmen Darrell Issa (R-CA), Nick Rahall (D-WV), Ray LaHood (R-IL), and Charles Boustany (R-LA) (as well as Dean of the House of Representatives John Dingell (D-MI)) introduced a resolution "congratulating the people of Lebanon for their determination to peacefully demonstrate and assemble, conduct parliamentary elections...and exercise their right to vote..." The resolution includes a call to heal the country's "sectarian divisions" and supports economic development programs...Congressman Issa also sponsored a resolution condemning the July 23 terrorist attacks in Egypt, which passed with unanimous support. "These attacks, again, make plain the fact that the Global War on Terrorism is not a war of the West against the Muslim world but a war being fought between those who value freedom, democracy, and a respect for human rights and those who kill innocent civilians," Issa said. And as mentioned in last week's Countdown <http://aaiusa.org/countdown/c072205.htm>, Senator John Sununu (R-NH) advocated for an increase in aid to Lebanon, including its educational institutions. "The American schools in Lebanon...prepare the next generation of leaders by graduating young men and women who have a solid understanding of the forces of globalization, are committed to democratic values, and have the skills to reform their societies and bridge the differences between those societies and the West," said Sununu.

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

State Dept.: Iran training Hizbullah in Lebanon

2005-07-29T22:10:11Z

A top State Department official informed Congress on Thursday that Iranian training personnel are helping Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon.

Assistant Secretary of State David Welch told the House International Relations Committee the information was provided by "our own sources."

Welch also testified there was "a continuing covert Syrian presence there" despite the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

And, Welch said, there are armed Palestinian groups in Lebanon, as well.

Welch said the United States would have no contact with Lebanon's energy and water minister, Mohammed Fneish, who is a member of Hizbullah.

The State Department official reiterated the long-standing US determination that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization.

The group is known to operate with weapons provided by Iran that are channeled to it through Syria, which borders Lebanon.

Asked by Rep. Howard Berman whether Iranian cadre were training Hizbullah in Lebanon, Welch replied, "Yes."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1122518931429&p=1101615860782

posted in Lebanon - 7 replies

Rice in surprise visit to Beirut

2005-07-25T16:32:59Z

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has begun a visit to Lebanon in an unexpected break with the published schedule for her Middle East trip.
She met pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud after paying her respects at the tomb of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and meeting his son.

Ms Rice's visit comes days after a new Lebanese government was formed.

The cabinet emerged from the first elections in 30 years to be held without Syrian troops in Lebanon.

Damascus completed its withdrawal following Lebanese and US pressure in the wake of Hariri's assassination.

Many Lebanese blamed Syria for the car-bomb attack on the former prime minister in February - an allegation denied by Damascus.

Open-door policy

Ms Rice is on hastily-arranged three-day visit to the Middle East.

She made no comments after her talks with President Lahoud.

Rice paid tribute at the tomb of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri

But at a news conference earlier, she said the US "would like to see the day when there are good neighbourly relations between Syria and Lebanon based on mutual respect and equality".

"But good neighbours don't close their borders to their neighbours," Ms Rice said in a reference to recent measures by Syria to tighten cargo traffic from Lebanon.

"It is a very serious situation on the Lebanese border where Lebanese trade is being strangled," said the US secretary of state.

She met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Friday morning and is expected to have talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday.

The visit to the region follows a surge in Palestinian-Israeli violence and mass protests by Israelis opposed to the withdrawal, set for mid-August.

Ms Rice appears to have cleared her schedule for Friday after the meeting with Mr Sharon to make time for the visit to Lebanon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4706819.stm

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Lineup of Lebanon's new Cabinet

2005-07-21T23:10:33Z

Beirut, Lebanon - A new Lebanese cabinet was formally approved by President Emile Lahoud on Tuesday July 19, 2005. A presidential decree was issued in which Fouad Siniora was appointed as the Prime Minister and the individual cabinet members were named.

Below is the Lineup of the new Lebanese Government

Prime Minister
Fouad Siniora: A Sunni Moslem who served in all the cabinets of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri from 1992 thru 2004.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense
Elias Murr: A Greek Orthodox Christian, who served as interior Minister from 2000 thru 2004. He served in the same post in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati

Minister of Foreign Affairs
Fawzi Salloukh: A Shiite Moslem who began his career as a diplomat. Served as Ambassador to Austria from 1990 thru 1994. In 1998 he switched to the academic field and became General Secretary of the Lebanese Islamic University. He is considered as independent; does not belong to either Hezbollah or the Amal movement.

Minister of Labor
Tarrad Kanj Hamadeh: A Shiite Moslem who earned a PHD from the French Sorbonne University. He served in the same post in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati

Minister of Health
Mohammad Khlifeh: A Shiite Moslem who is the Head of the General Surgery Section of the American University of Beirut Medical Center. He served in the same post in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati.

Minister of Agriculture
Talal Sahili: A Shiite Moslem who serves as a telecommunications professor at the Lebanese University. He is a researcher and inventor.

Minister of Energy & Water
Mohammad Fneish: A Shiite Moslem and a member of Hezbollah. He served as an MP since 1992

Minister of Justice
Charles Rizk: A Marnonite Christian who served in the in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati as the Minister of Information. A close ally of the president and represnts him on the Francophone Permanent Committee.

Minister of Finance
Jihad Azour: A Marnonite Christian who served as a finance advisor to previous Finance Ministers (Corm and Siniora).

Minister of Tourism
Joseph Sarkis: A Marnonite Christian and a member of the Phalangist party from 1993 thru 1998. In 2002 he became the leader of the Lebanese Forces.

Minister of Industry:
Pierre Gemayel: A Marnonite Christian lawyer and the youngest MP. First elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2005.

Minister of Social Affairs
Nayla Mouawad: A Marnonite Christian and the only female in the cabinet. Served as an MP since 1992 and was re-elected in 2005.

Minister of Public Works & Transport
Mohammad Safadi: A Sunni Moslem who was elected in 2005 as a new member of the Parliament.

Minister of Education
Khaled Kabbani: A Sunni Moslem who is a judge. He served in the in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati as the Minister of Justice.

Minister of Interior
Hassan Sabaa: A Sunni Moslem who served in the same post in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati.

Minister of Youth & Sports
Hassan Fatfat: A Sunni Moslem who is a Medical Specialist. He served as an MP since 1996 and re-elected in 2005.

Minister of Communications
Marwan Hamade: A Druze who served as the Minister of Health from 1992 thru 1996, Minister of Displaced from 1996 thru 2000 and Economy and Trade Minister from 2000 thru 2004. He is known as Mr. Clean and left very positive impact on all the ministries he headed.

Minister of Information
Ghazi Aridi: A Druze who served in the same post from 2000 to 2004. In 2004 he served as Minister of education. First elected as MP in 2000 and was re-elected in 2005.

Minister of Economy & Trade
Sami Haddad: A Protestant Christian, who held several management positions with IMF. His most recent position with IMF was manager of North Africa and the Middle East. Prior to that he worked as the Vice Governor for the Lebanese Central Bank.

Minister of the Displaced
Nehmeh Tohmeh: A Greek Catholic Christian, who was first elected as MP in 2000 and was re-elected in 2005. A Civil Engineer, who owns several engineering companies.

Minister of education
Tarek Mitri: A Greek Orthodox Christian who served in the caretaker government of PM Najib Mikati. He has been serving as the coordinator of inter-religious relations and dialogue at World Council of Churches since 1991.

Minister of Environment
Yaacoub Sarraf: A Greek Orthodox Christian who served as Governor of Beirut since 1999 and Mount Lebanon deputy Governor since 2002. A Civil engineer by profession.

Minister of Administrative Development
Jean Hogasapian: An Armenian Christian who served in the presidential Guard from 1990 thru 2000. First elected as an MP in 2000 and re-elected in 2005

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/07/_lineup_of_leba.php

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Wide Angle with Bill Moyers

2005-07-19T04:20:29Z

This week is about Lebanon and the future of the Cedar Revolution

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

London plays host to debate on the future of Lebanon

2005-07-18T23:00:41Z

BEIRUT: A debate entitled "Lebanon looking to the Future" was held at the British House of Commons with the participation of former Arab League representative in London Ghayth Armanazi, former head of Middle East affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations Jonathan Paris, economic expert Hassan Khalil and journalist Zahira Harb.

Khalil warned against linking foreign assistance to Lebanon with the implementation of the second clause of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which is related to disarming Hizbullah.

Two weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman said Lebanon should not expect any economic aid unless Hizbullah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group, becomes a purely political party.

He added that any military confrontation between the Lebanese Army and Hizbullah would lead to a civil war

and will be reflected by other Arab countries.

Khalil also criticized Lebanon's recent parliamentary elections for having been held under an unfair law, and called for reholding the elections based on the proportional representation system.

Armanazi also criticized the elections, saying they reinforced the sectarian and feudal system because they were held hastily under U.S. pressure. But he said the presence of President Emile Lahoud and Speaker Nabih Berri asserted that "the Lebanese-Syrian relationship was still strong and that Syria still has influence in Lebanon, despite the withdrawal of its troops."

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=16651#

posted in Lebanon - 29 replies

Muslims Against Terrorism

2005-07-14T20:36:48Z

www.islamfortoday.com/terrorism.htm
www.islamfortoday.com/fundamnetalism.htm
www.freemuslims.org/
www.m-a-t.org/
http://www.rayhawk.com/classics/matusa/home.html
www.awesomelibrary.org/Muslims.html

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

New Amani of Lebanon Tribe!

2005-07-09T14:47:27Z

Come join us!

http://tribes.tribe.net/c9b67f06-02c1-4576-ab03-6428cf2b8629?r=10389

Katya xoxo

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

In past days...

2005-07-05T21:33:08Z

I've made it no secret that I am NOT an authority on Lebanese history and current affairs. I'm just the opposite, in fact. But, I seem to recall (and correct me if I'm wrong) that in my younger days Lebanon was considered a model of Middle Eastern stability and an attractive tourist destination. Am I thinking of somewhere else?

posted in Lebanon - 43 replies

Joke of the Day! T.G.I.F

2005-07-04T22:11:19Z

Three most common things heard in Lebanese-American
households when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982:

1. " Oh great, Uncle Elias is going to want to stay another goddam summer."

2. " How's Danny Thomas going to explain this?"

3. " Daddy, does this mean we're Arabs now?"

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

opinions of six lebanese people about the elections.

2005-07-02T00:51:24Z

The titles says it all.

http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/specials/lebElections/lebElections.html?s=spworld

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Support Free Press in Lebanon

2005-06-30T18:30:33Z

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/ipay1.asp

{please give as much as you can!}

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Food

2005-06-25T22:28:07Z

OK, here's for something very non-political: FOOD!
Aaaah, wonderful Lebanese food.... :-)

But tell me: I was invited to eat at home with some people in Beirut. One of the dishes were very small fried birds.
They didn't speak much English so I didn't really understand.
Could it be that these were bird embrios that have been in the egg for 14 days and then are taken out and cooked?
I admit, I didn't really feel like trying them...

And there are other Lebanese specialities like lamb brain...

(So after all it's not only the Chinese who eat EVERYTHING?)

posted in Lebanon - 4 replies

the more important stuff

2005-06-23T00:56:09Z

after the elections have passed, and although nothing has changed much,because the same poeple came back, those who have put us n a 40 billion dolalr debt. yet we have to look forward and wish that they have changed.
we have to start talking about the economical stuff, and enviromental issues and ......
i am specially intrested in the enviromental things and we should start talking more about it here and try to point out the problems and solutions ....
so lets put our political conflicts aside and look forward for a new lebanon.

posted in Lebanon - 5 replies

Political revolution?

2005-06-21T18:38:43Z

Beirut, Lebanon - The million Lebanese that marched on the streets of Beirut on March 14 were united. Christians, Muslims and Druze were one voice like never before. They all wanted to see a new Lebanon,

free from the Syrians. A Lebanon that is free of sectarian influence. A Lebanon that is united in its resolve to reform for the better. What did they get instead?

Not much!

1- It is true that the Syrian troops are out if the country, but according to published reports the Syrian intelligence is still freely moving in Lebanon. Aoun's partnership with the Syrian Loyalists, gave them legitimacy that they lost when the Syrian troops pulled out.

2- Sectarianism is very much alive in Lebanon. The results of the elections showed clearly that voters were voting on sectarian basis. Gone were the symbols of unity shown during the March demonstrations.

3- The opposition is divided, thanks to the failed attempt to negotiate a deal with General Aoun. The Kornet Shahwan movement was badly wounded if not completely dead after the Mount Lebanon elections. If the momentum continues in the fourth round in Northern Lebanon's elections, say goodbye to the majority that was projected by Saad Hariri. Aoun is fielding support from the Syrian loyalists, such as former PM Omar Karami and Suleiman Franjieh, as he did in Mount Lebanon and Zahle. His alliance with the Syrian loyalists will not be free, God knows what the price will be!

4- Jumblatt and Hariri's alliance with Speaker Nabih Berri and Hezbollah will also not be free. Hezbollah has an agenda that may not fit well with the new Lebanon that the Cedar Revolution marchers called for. The presence of the arms in the hands of Hezbollah is a destabilizing factor, if not properly controlled by a strong government.

The question remains: Will the new government complete the political revolution that million marchers hoped for?

Story continued at: http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/06/will_the_new_go.php

posted in Lebanon - 5 replies

The Middle East's real problem: The mafia

2005-06-17T20:13:29Z

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/11/mafia/

Its self explanatory. Powerful families have a major foothold in the politics in nations like Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. Those who have first hand knowledge of the region; how much of a foothold do such families still have?

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

hizbullah.....

2005-06-16T17:37:36Z

i really want you people to be as moderate as possible in this discussion, becuase this topic is really a very sensetive one in lebanon, and we really need to talk about it.
the topic is about the disarment of hizbullah, and also about what hizbullah resembels.
....
i live in lebanon, and i am so not with hizbullah on many and many issues. but i really don't like it when poeple call hizbullah as a terrorist organization. there is a big difference btwn poeple who are resisting an occupation and poeple who occupy by force.
as we all nkow its not a right for the poeple to resist occupation, its a must , its an obligation.
hizbullah has been a lebanese resistance party, all they have done is resist the isreali occupation.
now that there is still some parts of the south still under occupation, then hizbullah has hte right to keep its arms. the issue i disagree hizbullah with is that when all the occupied land is freed, then it must drop its arms, becuase they are risistence not defenders and their existence is only based for resisting occupation not defending a country.

posted in Lebanon - 65 replies

Europe trans Mediterranean

2005-06-14T01:09:13Z

http://euro-med-economic-area.tribe.net/

posted in Lebanon - 4 replies

Miss lebanese tribe

2005-06-13T17:45:26Z

although we are still a small tribe, yet we are going to have the first beauty contest to elect Miss lebanese tribe. :)
this way we would move a little bit from politics.
you should vote for any picture in the person's profile and also for her contributions in the conversation.

posted in Lebanon - 13 replies

Tales, myths and other stories about Qadisha needed...

2005-06-11T09:00:48Z

Hello...
I'm looking for tales, myths and other stories about the Qadisha valley. Anything might do...
The material might be used for my next book. Those who get into the book will be mentionned on the "thank you page" and I'll think of something to express my thanks more visually...
So, go ask your relatives, friends etc.

TIA

Tarek

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Saga continues...

2005-06-10T07:13:08Z

Opposition Sacks Aoun, Vows 'Unto Death' Crusade to Depose Lahoud

A national schism has developed in the aftermath of writer Samir Kassir's assassination as the Pan-Lebanon opposition front sacked Gen. Aoun from its ranks and vowed 'unto death' campaign to overthrow President Lahoud, while the Gen. rushed to Lahoud's defense, holding the opposition indirectly responsible for Kassir's death.

http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/getstory?openform&CCC7B659382EC0EEC225701400690075
"Yes, definitely we have expelled Gen. Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement," Marwan Hamadeh said over slain ex-Premier Hariri's Future TV network hard on the heels of an opposition declaration that formally proclaimed the General a renegade, citing his electoral coalition pacts with "the lingering symbols of Syria's tutelage over Lebanon."

"The situation must henceforth be crystal clear. Ambiguities are no longer permissible," Said Hamadeh, who miraculously survived a car-bomb assassination attempt near his Beirut house Oct. 1. "The General has to either quit his election pacts with the lingering symbols of Syria's trusteeship or face a head-on confrontation with the united opposition front."

Hamadeh also hinted that the opposition might stage a million-strong demonstration to march from Beirut's downtown Martyrs Square to the Presidential palace in Baabda to force Lahoud to resign.

An Nahar's General Manager Gebran Tueni, in turn, made a fervent appeal to Gen. Aoun to return to the opposition fold for a united, collective drive to wipe out "the last traces and the last vestiges of Syria's hegemony over Lebanon."

Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement representative Jubran Bassil attended the opening part of the opposition meeting at the Bristol hotel, but walked out in a huff minutes later, saying the opposition, which holds the interior and justice ministries, "should do better and act faster" in coping with security blowups.

The 2-hour Bristol meeting issued a statement read to the press by Leader of the Democratic Left Movement Elias Attallah, which called for :

1- Continuation of the Independence Uprising.

2- Demanding the resignation of the President of the Republic in his capacity as the actual leader of the police regime, security and intelligence-wise.
3- Asserting the persistence of the parliamentary election as a public referendum.

4- Pleading with the U.N. Secretary-General to send back the international verification commission to ascertain that all Syrian secret services have been withdrawn from Lebanon.

5- A call for a general strike on Friday.

Expediting on Aoun's expulsion, Walid Jumblat told reporters after the meeting "those who view the crime of Samir Kassir's assassination a security rather than a political case have taken themselves completely out of the opposition."

As for Lahoud's ouster, Jumblat said "there are no halfway solutions. The regime should be deposed in its entirety. We will accept no compromise as part of the opposition had done to return from abroad as a Trojan Horse. There is no way of compromise with the police state. With this regime, you're either dead or alive, victor or vanquished."

posted in Lebanon - 30 replies

Greetings!

2005-06-08T18:42:26Z

I'm not sure why (maybe it's because of the Middle Eastern music and movie tribes I belong to), but out of the blue this Irish-American in the Pacific Northwest received an invitation to join the Lebanon tribe. It's quite a coincidence, though. I just (and I mean the day before yesterday) finished Anne Soffee's book "Snake Hips," part of which deals with her Lebanese-American heritage and family.

So far, I the threads I've read are very enlightening and insightful. Thank you for the education. I am gleaning a better understanding of that volatile part of the world.

posted in Lebanon - 0 replies

Pro-Syrians claim S Lebanon poll

2005-06-06T06:26:27Z

Pro-Syrians claim S Lebanon poll

Pro-Syrian parties in Lebanon say they have won the latest round of landmark parliamentary elections in the south.
The Hezbollah and Amal movements, which put forward a single list of candidates, say preliminary results indicate they have taken all 23 seats.

The elections, being held in four stages, are the first in 30 years to be held without the presence of Syrian troops, which withdrew in April.

Official results will not be declared until Monday.

Last Sunday, anti-Syrian candidates won all 19 seats in elections in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

Powerful player

There are 23 seats to be won in the south, but six of the candidates on the joint Amal-Hezbollah list have already secured a seat in parliament because they ran unchallenged in their district.

"I thank all my people in the great south for renewing their confidence in the list and for the victory of all its candidates," said Amal leader Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament and a pro-Syrian former warlord, the Reuters news agency reported.

Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, said it was clear all members of the join lists had won.

"The south has declared through this vote its clear stance in supporting this track," he said, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Almost as soon as the polls had closed, Amal and Hezbollah supported began noisy horn-honking, flag waving celebrations that lasted late into the night, says the BBC's Jim Muir in Beirut.

Correspondents say turnout among the more than 650,000 eligible voters in southern Lebanon was low, with a higher number of voters in Shia Muslim towns than in Christian areas.

Many people in Christian and Sunni communities stayed away from the polls, because of what they described as an unfair electoral law.

Hezbollah was credited with ousting the Israeli army from southern Lebanon in 2000, after 22 years of occupation.

International pressure

The Syrian-backed group remains a powerful player in the south and in Lebanese politics, says the BBC's Kim Ghattas in Beirut.

It has 20,000 militiamen under arms in Lebanon, and has vowed to keep fighting until Israel withdraws from a disputed area on the border.

But the group is under international pressure to disarm.

Our correspondent says Hezbollah is hoping for a strong show of support for its policies and armed wing.

Party banners have urged southern residents that a vote for Hezbollah is a vote against US interference in Lebanon.

Reports say families in cars and buses waving Hezbollah flags drove to the south because voters in Lebanon are required to cast their ballots in their home towns.

"I voted for Hezbollah and Amal because they protect us and stand in the face of the Israelis and Americans," Hussein Awada told Reuters news agency, in the city of Tyre.

"Only the resistance freed us from Israel," said Samira Mezher in the town of Nabatiyeh.

"I am voting for them because without them we are worthless."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4610655.stm

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

Nightlife

2005-06-04T21:41:43Z

What are the night spots you can recommend?

We went to Monot street, but some of the clubs there are rather "young". Which are places where people over 30 can go to without feeling like a dinosaur?

Of course we went to restaurants with dinner shows, but sometimes you just wanna shake it :-)

posted in Lebanon - 7 replies

Lebanese Websites

2005-06-04T07:43:23Z

These are great websites if you don't already visit them:

http://yalibnan.com/site/

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/home3.asp

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

Music schools in Lebanon....

2005-06-04T01:34:38Z

Does anybody know what the major music schools and conservatories in Lebanon are?

Thanks,
~D

posted in Lebanon - 1 reply

R.I.P. Samir Kassir

2005-06-03T17:51:42Z

Beirut - Lebanon - Hundreds of Lebanese newspaper journalists and media reporters held pens in an open-air silent protest at Martyrs Square in downtown Beirut today, in tribute for Journalist Samir Kassir of Al Nahar Newspaper who was assassinated on Thursday.

The assassination of Kassir brought condemnation by the world community. The United Nations, United States and European Union have condemned Samir Kassir's assassination.
Kofi Annan's spokesman said in a statement: "The Secretary-General strongly condemns the killing of Samir Kassir, a prominent and outspoken Lebanese journalist,"... "The Secretary-General calls on the Lebanese Government to bring to justice the perpetrators and the instigators of today's terrible crime and to ensure an end to impunity and the continuation of press freedom." ... "(Annan) urges all parties to preserve national unity and calm during this important electoral period," it added.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, speaking after a U.S.-EU ministerial meeting, both condemned the death of An Nahar's columnist.
"It's a heinous act," Rice said. She said the killers were not known but pointedly added the assassination came with Lebanon in the midst of legislative elections following the withdrawal of Syrian troops...Obviously someone is trying to intimidate the Lebanese people as they move through this electoral cycle...That I think will not happen because the Lebanese people want to build a new democracy," the chief U.S. diplomat said.

Amnesty International has also expressed concern over the assassination of columnist Samir Kassir, urging authorities to launch " an immediate, independent and impartial investigation," into the killing.

The one-hour protest came in response to a plea from An Nahar's General-Manager Gebran Tueni, who was elected to Lebanon's new parliament on Sunday. Leading the observance, Tueni was flanked by the chairmen of Lebanon's Press Association and Journalists Association, Mohammed Baalbaki and Milhem Karam.
Dozens of opposition leaders, including MP Marwan Hamadeh, also attended the journalistsâ€™ protest. All were dressed in white and black clothes and many had red-and-white opposition shawls wrapped around their necks. All six major TV networks of Beirut ran a live coverage of the event.

The black pens held in the event carried Samir Kassir's name on one side and An Nahar's on the other.

An overnight candlelight vigil was earlier staged from Martyrs Square to the scene of the assassination near Kassir's house in Ashrafiyeh, which was led by his daughters Mayssa and Eliana and Rana.

Giselle Khoury, Widow of the slain journalist, who was in the United States when her husband was assassianted, returned immediately to Lebanon and called for immediate investigation of the murder. She also demanded a French Role in the investigation, since Kassir also held French Citizenship. Giselle is a prominent media star and currently works for Al Arabiya , the satellite network, in Lebanon

Police investigators were split Friday over the method with which Samir Kassir was assassinated. There are 2 theories:
First Theory: An explosive charge was rigged into Kassir's car engine that went off as he turned on the ignition.
Second Theory: A bomb was planted under the driver's seat and was detonated by remote control.

The size and weight of the explosive used has also been subjected to speculation. Estimates ranged from 5 to 7.5 kilograms.

There are no leads yet as who the killers were. Opposition has already blamed president Lahoud and Syria. Syria denied any involvement.

Top right hand picture is of a Lebanese journalist holding a pen bearing the name of slain anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir during a sit-in at Martyrs Square in Beirut June 3, 2005

http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2005/06/strike_in_leban.php

posted in Lebanon - 3 replies

I love Beirut!

2005-06-03T16:29:45Z

What's your favourite place in Lebanon?

My first time in Lebanon was about 13 years ago, we stayed mainly in the Chouf mountains.

But when I got back last year, just after diving towards the "centre ville" I knew that I had fallen in love :-)

Oh, when you ever fly there, get a seat on the left side of the airplane, so you get a superb view of Beirut by night (international flights normally arrive at night).

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

Syria flexes muscle in Lebanon

2005-06-02T17:33:26Z

Syria flexes muscle in Lebanon
By Nicholas Blanford | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIRUT, LEBANON - Lebanon's parliament is set Friday to rubber-stamp a Syrian-ordained decision to grant its close ally President Emile Lahoud an additional three years in office.

But the move, which has sparked a storm of protest here as well as international disapproval, now faces a formidable challenge from the United Nations Security Council, which was expected Thursday to preempt the Lebanese parliament by approving a resolution effectively giving Syria 30 days to leave Lebanon.

The UN intervention and mounting domestic opposition is rapidly turning the debate over the presidential extension into the most serious crisis in Lebanese-Syrian relations since the end of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

"This is the greatest miscalculation Syria has made in recent years," says Farid Khazen, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. "The Syrians thought they could get away with imposing their man on Lebanon, but they failed to realize that the world has changed."

Mr. Lahoud's six-year term was supposed to end in November in accordance with the Lebanese Constitution. But Syria made it known last week that it wanted its ally to remain.

The unusually blatant nature of the decision outraged the mainly Christian opposition and has stunned even Syria's Lebanese allies. It also had the rare effect of uniting the United States and France on a Middle East issue, with the two countries cosponsoring the draft UN Security Council resolution.

Simon Karam, a former Lebanese ambassador to Washington and a member of the Qornet Shehwan opposition group, says that if Lahoud is granted his extension, "the relationship between Lebanon and Syria will turn from the facade coalition that it is now into sheer occupation," he says.

The draft Security Council resolution includes demands that Syria withdraw its estimated 15,000 troops from Lebanon and that all militias to be dismantled, a reference to Lebanon's Hizbullah organization. If the demands are not met within 30 days, "additional measures" could be taken to enforce the resolution, raising the possibility of economic and financial sanctions again Syria and Lebanon.

Damascus already faces strong pressure from the US for its support of Palestinian and Lebanese organizations designated in Washington as terrorist groups, as well as its alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and its opposition to the US role in Iraq.

But Michael Young, a Lebanese political commentator, says that Syria's backing for Lahoud shows it prefers the status quo.

"It's a simple rule with the Syrians. They are not comfortable with change, especially when they feel under pressure," Mr. Young says.

But domestic opposition to Lahoud's presidential extension is gaining momentum. The influential Maronite church issued a withering indictment on Wednesday of Syria's interference in Lebanese affairs, saying Damascus treats Lebanon as if it were a "Syrian province."

"Syria gives orders, appoints leaders, organizes parliamentary and other elections, brings in whoever it wants and drops whoever it wants, and interferes in all aspects of life: in the administration, the judiciary, the economy and particularly politics, through its representatives here and their aides," the statement said.

The crisis has left Syria's allies struggling to justify publicly why the president should be granted a further term in office.

"It is our choice that the president remain because the situation in the region is unstable and change at this time is not beneficial," says Qassem Qanso, a minister of state, the head of the Lebanese branch of the Baath Party, and one of Syria's closest allies.

But amending the Lebanese constitution to grant Lahoud an extra three years in office requires two-thirds of parliament to vote in favor of the measure.

The key to the vote resides with Lebanon's redoubtable prime minister, Rafik Hariri, a billionaire businessman who has steered the country through its post-civil war reconstruction phase. Mr. Hariri, who heads the largest parliamentary bloc, is a bitter rival of the president.

Hariri had indicated he would resign if Lahoud stayed on as president. But he appeared to change his mind after meeting with Gen. Rustum Ghazali, the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, who plays the role of Syrian proconsul here. Hariri subsequently told his bloc to vote as they please before heading to his holiday home in Sardinia for a short break.

Analysts say that the prospect of another three years of political and economic paralysis between Hariri and Lahoud spells disaster for the country. "We've had no political life and economic life has been blocked," Young says. "And all the Syrians can do is perpetuate this."

posted in Lebanon - 2 replies

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